The makers of the popular iPhone photography app Halide have just launched Kino. The pro video app has been in development for around a year now after Lux announced in 2023 that they were working on a video app with the same simplicity and advanced features found in Halide.
Kino is quite a big deal for iPhone owners, especially those using their devices to film and shoot professional content. Kino targets the iPhone 15 Pro’s support for the Apple ProRes video codec. This file format lets users shoot video content in the Log format.
If you don’t know, Log is a super flat colour profile which allows video editors to control the look and feel of their project thanks to the uncompressed file format. These video files are quite large but the freedom to tweak exposure and other various balances makes a huge difference during the edit.
Kino, of course, also boasts ProRes support for the iPhone 15 Pro. In addition, users can also save video files directly onto an SSD. This is a great way to tackle the huge file sizes from the video codec.
But Kino has other noteworthy video features that might attract filmographers. The Instant Grade feature allows users to film content with a preset “grade”. These grades can either be applied to only the video screen or to both the screen and the saved file. You can import LUT files to fiddle around with other grades.
There’s also an AutoMotion feature that automatically chooses the best exposure settings for cinematic motion blur. The camera app also comes with all the various manual control features you would expect when shooting video on the iPhone. These include shutter control, exposure compensation, AE/WB locking and audio level detection.
Kino is running a special launch promotion at the moment. Until tomorrow, you can buy the app as a once-off purchase for R199. After which, it will cost you R399. You can find the app on the App Store here. It currently supports iOS 17 devices.
