Kino: Pro Video Camera
lux.camera
lux.camera
Perhaps I'm just uneducated and there is a place to still see it in the app with an active subscription or see the IAP price on the app store but even if there were it'd all just be a pain compared to "It's $9.99, wanna buy?" in your face at the app store and anywhere you read about it.
The only other (very minor) thing that gave me a startle was the onboarding process asks if you want to go "starter" or some other more advanced category. I thought I missed that it would try to upsell you until I reread and saw it meant I could select either layout type out of the box. Not sure that's really the apps fault as much as my paranoia after having just checked through all the above and being left thinking I missed something.
I'm not a video editor so I can't speak to that but here's one example:
Most calorie counting apps want ~16AUD a month from me. That's what Disney+ costs and they spend billions of dollars making content. It's 3$ more than Spotify charges and they have almost every song ever made. It doesn't have to be free, or even a one-off cost, but it has to be reasonable. I'd pay 4$ for calorie counting features. 16? No.
There are some apps in this genre that are absolutely insane - $300 or so for an AI image analyser, which you have no way to try unless you sign up for a trial where you are committed to that amount unless you remember to cancel.
I’m offering a one-time in app purchase of life-time subscription. Currently it costs 6x the monthly subscription cost.
I'm worried that makes it too expensive for a simple app, at the same time lowering it would make the monthly subscription less sensible.
I'm curious if anyone has indie experience and thoughts regarding this.
I'm fine with it if includes some monthly re-occurring service, like cloud storage/sync.
I purchased YNAB4 and I ran it just fine on my desktop. But YNAB5 went to subscription, and it included things like syncing multiple devices (which of course needs servers, which cost), but I have no need for that, and so I did not move to it. I'd much prefer I pay some one-time fee, and if I want syncing I can subscribe to just that.
I also understand that if I pay $x for Version Y, then if I want Version Z there may be an upgrade fee.
What sucks is when the developer adds some recurring service to their software that I don't want, purely as an excuse to justify moving to subscription, and then no longer offers the software without the "service" for a one-time price.
For most of the software I use, I specifically don't want to be tethered to some kind of online service, have to have a network connection to run it, and so on. And I'll actively look for the competing software that's a one-time cost and isn't Cloud-ified.
The only annoying thing is you have to get the free app, wait a day or two and then it will offer you the discounted premium subscription.
People can only afford a limited number of subscriptions at a time, and with an ever-increasing number of companies putting their hand into that pocket, there is less to go around.
Give enough time (1-2y) and they will charge a subscription from you and lock you away from the app you've purchased.
This post introduces the subscriptions: https://medium.com/halide/introducing-halide-mkii-30f9f2bcea...
The unpredictability of the pricing model itself is an important point.
a) Free: Due to lack of revenue, the company that makes your favorite tool may stop developing new features, add intrusive ads, sell your personal data, and/or sell itself to a nasty buyer that will end up killing your tool’s future in one of various ways.
b) Subscription-based: Many software tools are naturally products, not services, yet this model can artificially and unnecessarily turn them into services. Users may end up paying too much over the long run, the software publisher is not necessarily motivated to keep improving the tool, and if the company or a future owner decides to kill off the product, you won’t be able to keep using it (regardless of how much more you’d be willing to pay to do so.)
c) One-time purchase with permanently free updates: Though it provides the software publisher with revenue and users may appreciate the ability to keep using the tool they bought forever, the product may experience market saturation at some point, and the publisher may stop receiving revenue from new users. The publisher will not be motivated and/or financially able to improve the program and may be tempted to switch to the subscription-based model.
I really wish more companies would go back to the old-style model where users can buy the current version of a software tool but would need to pay a discounted price to upgrade to a newer version of that tool (a major-version upgrade.) Along with this, customers would get free upgrades for a limited time (such as year) or all minor upgrades during the current major version. I believe this model creates a healthy incentive for a software publisher to keep improving its products while receiving revenue from both new and existing customers (reducing the market-saturation problem.) Unfortunately, both publishers and especially users may have grown unaccustomed to this model and may not appreciate its benefits.
We can thank Apple for this! They refused to adopt upgrade pricing on the App Store (which developers have been asking for since the App Store launched!) and instead introduced Subscriptions.
I like Apple, overall, but they absolutely decimated their software market by forcing apps to either be free with ads or paid subscriptions.
"Reasonable number" implies that you're fine with it. But where is that threshold? I bet it's different for everyone.
Companies need to be up front with what they are charging for. "Let's say $9.99 because we're not even sure if we'll be around in 5 years" is not a good model.
That is a perfectly reasonable amount of money for consumer software to cost.
So I paid for Kino without hesitation. Just fired it up, set BNW grade, pressed record, and it immediately crashed. Tried again and it crashed again. Tried AGAIN and it worked... (iPhone 13 mini, iOS 17.4.1).
I have faith this will be worked out soon.
Unfortunately, while we had a QA person on this, and nearly 100 beta testers, the iPhone camera APIs are a mine field. We’ll get a fix out as soon as we have details.
My phone is due for an upgrade soon, so it’s not a big deal at the moment.
That said, it doesn't hold a candle to Android fragmentation. It's a major reason we will not touch the platform.
1. They're using the crash reports provided through App Store Connect. These are stack traces with no personally identifying information. You can enable/disable these under Settings > Privacy & Security > Share With App Developers.
2. They're using a third-party crash reporter. Under the covers these are often based on PLCrashReporter or KSCrash. A few such as Firebase (previously Crashlytics) implement their own exception handlers/stack unwinders. These are typically anonymized, but at this point it's the app (or the crash reporting SDK it includes) to decide exactly what to report. Most apps will try hard to avoid PII because that's easier than dealing with GDPR, CCPA, ATT disclosures, etc.
> As soon as the crash reports come in
This leads me to believe it's (1) since third-party crash reporters usually send in the crash reports as soon as the app has restarted, while Apple delays crash reports in App Store Connect. In which case the app itself isn't collecting anything: it's iOS and you choose to opt-in when you first setup the device.
We must specify that we're collecting diagnostics (apart from the ones Apple collects on our behalf for opt-in users) even if they aren't attached to PII or user identifiers. So if they're doing this honestly, it indicates they are relying on Apple's opt-in crash analytics exclusively.
In my experience at least 80-90% of users are NOT opted in to sharing usage analytics with Apple, so they won't receive most crash reports unless they're collecting them through an undisclosed backdoor.
I did also find manual focus produced odd green visual artefacts in the live view as you move the focus control.
With that said, it’s a nice UI, hopefully the bugs can be ironed out!
It's the only app I've ever bought whose developer has done that bullshit.
I won't make that mistake again.
I'm not sure which group the Halide changes mentioned above fell into but just on the general topic I think it's a fair expectation.
They don't "give" you the new version. They take away the app you paid "once", and provide you with a version with an expire date. So you have no choice. You either pay them, again, or lose access to the v2 (subscription based) app.
I don't mind paying for good software, I even think Hallide is worth $60. But I won't make the same mistake again. So best of luck Lux! I really wish you all the success. If you treat your customers right this time.
That is "forever updates" = no but "take away what you had" also = no. It was a period of updates with a dropoff date of where you left off. This lines up with my expectations of a one time purchase in that I'm not expecting 50 years of feature updates when buying software just because they haven't went out of business yet I'm just expecting I keep the feature access I have at the end, which is what these posts from many different folks are all claiming.
The alternative would have been to just release a separate app called Halide 2 and stop updating Halide 1. In that case, version 1 would probably fall apart pretty quickly due to OS and camera changes year to year.
I’m genuinely curious if you’d have preferred we stopped updating Halide 1, because we’re always trying to find the best way to support users while keeping the light on.
Updates have always been a PITA on iOS. There’s no way to charge for them.
Following that, we had a series of bug fix updates while we worked out the next major update. It’s maybe 2/3 done, but we had to shelf it until after the Kino launch for external reasons.
New version every 2-3 years which required a purchase. It was a few hundred dollars every time you wanted to upgrade (people may not remember this, but PS was the "value" product when it launched; professional software was often low 4 figures).
There's tonnes of companies that have legacy 'pay upfront' models, that hit the wall as they'd saturated their markets, then their revenue stream dropped off and all of a sudden saw the wall of transitioning to web/mobile needing to happen and didn't have the funds to pull it off.
I'd almost completely forgotten about it until I was challenged by a prospect in a meeting monday 'is this one of these new lease software systems, I want to own it!" had to educate him on the way the world worked now...
Subscriptions bring in steady money that allows for better forecasting and resourcing.
Releasing a Very Big Paid Update every year or two years brings in an unknown lump sum of money with a tail end that might or might not be enough.
Could be related to the 13 mini cameras specifically.
No absolutely not. In Resolve specifically, you have nodes that you apply to the video where each node allows for specific settings to be applied as part of the grade. In a true grading session, you dial in the settings for black levels, white levels, contrast, saturation as primaries. Then there's secondaries which start finessing. You can then draw windows/mattes to isolate a specific area or specific color range (think color image where everything is B&W except the red rose/red car/red dress style) to apply the grading. There's also tracking of those windows. There's so much more going into color grading than "apply LUT here". Just look at the control surfaces for Resolve and the number of knobs/buttons/rollers. Would something that just applied LUTs need all of that?
> You know that when you do color grading with apps like Resolve, it is stored in memory as a LUT, right?
Source? That's a very gross oversimplification of what a color session is like. LUTs don't do tracking. LUTs don't do keys. LUTs don't do mattes.
You are doing colorists a disservice if you think grading is just LUTs.
There are some truly amazing colorists, and then there are people that claim they are colorists when they just applied a LUT. I would be embarassed to call myself a colorist that way. With my experience, I still do not call myself a colorist. I also don't go around calling myself a DP because I own a camera and make pretty pictures, yet people go around with no real training calling themselves that because it's cool.
Without LUTs, Look Up Tables, a computer would not be able to do color grading.
I've tried to explain how to use waveforms/vectorscopes and why they are important. Those things are rarely used any more, and people just don't realize how much more difficult they make it on themselves by not using them. Just because you can push that knob to an 11 doesn't mean you should. Pushing that knob while looking at the scopes will tell you when to stop. This was life or death when making content for broadcast.
Also, I've seen all sorts of weird things that blindly applying a LUT wouldn't solve. There was a specific Red camera in town that had a very strange issue where the green color channel was not recording correctly. One shoot we had footage on was of an ice cream type place that had lots of whipped cream on the desserts. However, as you pushed the levels up, the green lagged behind so as the red and blue channels were maxing out the color on the screen went magenta. Applying a LUT would have looked terrible, but the colorist was able to go in to adjust the levels of the green channel separately so that the cream went back to white. It saved the shoot because a camera was not working properly.
There's also interesting tricks to do like when shooting through windows of a high rise will give a green tint to things. So lowering just the green channel will bring things back which could be a specific LUT, but the thing with LUTs is they tend to get used for the wrong reasons. Shooting underwater without a filter can also be dialed back, but it's specific to camera/depth type of situations.
Another common ask was to "open up the eyes". Well lit faces are notoriously hard as the sunken eye sockets just naturally shadow. So you add a window to the eyes and push the exposure up to achieve the effect that no LUT will ever achieve. If the camera moves for a tracking shot, the windows can track along with it. No LUT will ever accomplish that either. The eye is naturally attracted to the brightest area of the screen, so there's ways of grading something so that it suddenly receives some attention that a LUT would not get there, again using windows. Some of the internationalization of releases have small forensic tells in them to indicate which locale it might have been leaked from. One specific example was a stack of towels in the background of various colors. Through color correction, they changed the colors of the towels to be different for each region.
So so so many things that well graded footage can have done to it that "you wouldn't understand" but would never come close to achieving with a LUT. Wouldn't understand is very harsh though, and is a total cop out from someone that sounds very pompous. I would say "wouldn't consider" as something that could be done let alone needed to be done.
Might I ask how much experience you have with the world of professional color sessions? I have been in film/video post pretty much since graduating high school, so I have been a part of prepping content/materials for a color session for decades, but have also spent several years working at a post house that only did color correction. I'm guessing that it is you that has the incorrect understanding of what goes on in a color grading session. If you want to go around thinking that applying a LUT is all that happens in a grading session, then you might as well think that anyone that uses Wix or Squarespace is a web designer, or anyone that assembles Ikea furniture is a craftsman. Your definition would be very skewed.
Just to be clear, I don't believe that it's just look up tables ... But I'm starting to believe that that's all you know to gripe about.
I've gone into so much detail on what goes on during a color grading session, yet you keep coming back to "but it's all LUTs" in the end. You're totally ignoring all of the work and effort that went into generating those LUTS. You're coming across like you could just download a LUT called TheMatrix.lut and any footage it is applied to will look just like The Matrix. That's not going to happen.
Somebody else came at me that they build AAA video games and that's their background with grading with LUTS. That's not even the same realm of grading camera originated footage. Being unable to recognize and admit that is just not worth arguing and that's where I left that one. Clearly, you are absolutely right in your mind and unwilling to acknowledge anything other than what you hold true.
I think the real reason why everyone including all of your cohorts behave like this is because when you press people they realize that they don't have a good way to explain it. It's a very fickle and varied thing per project and if you dig into any one example, it seems really silly and that brings out artists insecurities about how everything that they do is actually pretty silly. Whereas you know, say an experienced computer professional knows that everything is BS and they don't get so hung up on feeling called out by dumb things.
So yeah, I guess I'm used to the computer world where information sharing and how you share that information is so descriptive about where you're coming from. I guess I'm trying to figure out where you're coming from and it seems to be mostly that you have to deal with a bunch of idiots.
I do believe that there is a whole world of people out there that just think it's a lookup table. I'm sorry that that's all you deal with and that you can't explain it more than just to complain about those kind of people.
I really don't know how you think me and my cohorts are behaving. Is it that we (extrapolated from conversations I've heard) get offended because someone calls themself a colorist because they can apply a LUT? You think this is pompous that we do not agree that the ability to apply a LUT is the same thing as running a full color session? At this point, I'm really not sure what high horse you are on or that you think I am on.
Drawing windows, mattes, tracking, and other masking tools determine where and how the LUT is applied within the rendering pipeline.
> Source? That's a very gross oversimplification of what a color session is like. LUTs don't do tracking. LUTs don't do keys. LUTs don't do mattes.
I work in AAA games and have written code for tonemapping and color grading. We often use a gbuffer (graphics buffer that could be seen as a 2D screen-shaped image that is never shown) to mask different objects in the scene and apply different LUTs accordingly. So, it is not only LUTs that are applied in a similar screen-space way, but also masking is similar.
> There's so much more going into color grading than "apply LUT here". Just look at the control surfaces for Resolve and the number of knobs/buttons/rollers. Would something that just applied LUTs need all of that?
On a low level, it essentially is about applying LUTs. How you create these LUTs and how you mask their application are crucial aspects of the process. But ultimately, a LUT is applied to pixels. You are talking about the artistry techniques involved in making a LUT and masking where it is applied, which is not debated.
LUTs are not just files you can import and export to grade the whole image or frame. They are a fundamental compact data structure that makes SIMD operations easy, which is why they are used in grading. If you set up a color grading pipeline with nodes in Resolve, it is very likely compiled into one or more LUTs, which are then applied to the frames.
Hehe, you are not wrong.
Would hope to see them address these missing features in future updates, but at the moment there's nothing here to make me move away from Blackmagic for "serious" iPhone videography.
And for what it’s worth: I think 24fps is partially why people of frankly similar talent and beauty look untouchable on film, but just like some dude on social media. My personal back-filled theory is that it’s something to do with the fact that 24fps creates more gaps for your imagination to fill in with whatever burns inside your personal subconscious — those “missing” frames let you “see” in Russell Crowe or whomever just a little bit more of yourself than is possible in gapless, real-time reality. Sort of like how old photos with lower resolution feel comforting and organic, because they’re cloudy like dreams, unlike the stark reality that can be achieved by modern lenses.
It would also somewhat explain why high FPS works better for things like sports (where most of the awe is that you’re watching real people do these amazing things) and video games (where the awe comes from actually embodying the figure on screen and existing in their full framerate surroundings).
I think very few people (including myself) have ever seen a true side-by-side test where everything other than 24fps vs 30fps is perfectly identical. This is because correctly engineering such a head-to-head test is surprisingly difficult. In addition to having identical (or nearly identical) content shot in cinematic style, there are several other variables which each have to be technically correct. These include having the same signal chain from camera shutter speed, capture, compression, edit and grading to distribution format, playback device and display.
One thing that's especially tricky is whether the 24fps content ever goes through a 3:2 pulldown conversion (or similar). A significant amount of high-quality big-screen-film-sourced content originally made in 24fps goes through this sort of pulldown when viewed at home - even when the source is 24fps (whether Blu-ray, Netflix, Amazon or Apple). This pulldown process definitely imparts a look many associate with being "cinematic". Yet what we see in an actual theater is native 24fps so that's what we need to match for an accurate comparison.
Having recently upgraded my dedicated high-end home theater I was surprised that every device from playback source (streaming box or Blu-ray), AVR and 4k HDR projector - while being native 24f capable - defaulted to having the native 24f turned off in settings (thus silently applying a real-time 3:2 pulldown to the native 24f source). This was only discovered during detailed calibration using test signals. This means many people's impressions of 24fps may actually have been formed watching 24fps content automatically converted to 30fps with 3:2 pulldown by their source, AVR or display.
I suspect associating my subjective sense about "cinematic" with the label "24fps" may not only be erroneous but unfair to 30fps. Technically, 30fps has advantages in reducing motion judder on fast-moving objects and camera pans. A good example of this is the Hollywood-produced pre-digital 24fps Oliver Stone football movie "Any Given Sunday" which was shot entirely on film. They did the best they could with 24fps but some of the fast, ball-tracking camera pans are extremely distracting - something 30fps would have definitely helped if it had been an option back then. Nowadays, for the first time, the industry has some freedom to choose frame rates and I wonder if, done properly, 30fps might be a better option in which us film-look purists would lose nothing of what we love but gain in reducing some unavoidable artifacts from 24 frame's limitations.
Thank you for the one-time purchase option. It's a win already on today's software world.
[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20111130073123/http://www.filmicp...
[1]: https://www.cined.com/filmic-pro-is-joining-forces-with-bend...
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/3/23986187/filmic-staff-lai...
They were a successful business employing 23 people after more than a decade on the one time sales model!
It's happened with so many businesses.
Maybe the solution here is to stop supporting new phones with old versions. So your app works forever but if you upgrade your phone you have to buy the software again. It's hard to find what feels fair.
In the old days, you'd buy a new version of Mac or Windows or any software that you run on it (Office, Parallels, etc.) when you wanted the new features each year.
I think Apple's App Store has a lot to do with why everything is now subscription-based. They used to offer developers a smaller Apple-commission (15%) for subscription sales instead of the typical 30% for in-app purchase sales and paid-apps.
This was great for businesses, but in my opinion, only service businesses should be subscriptions - this transition would help reduce subscription fatigue. Normal software should mostly go back to just issuing new versions each year (or whatever frequency), so that consumers re-frame the purchase cycle to something that feels more reasonable again.
In order for this to occur, however, Apple may need to adjust the App Store algorithms. If you were to launch a new app (ex. "Kino v6"), you'd start all over again from day 1 with 0 app ratings and reviews, and not rank well on any keywords nor in the top apps charts.
Some apps simply rename their app with each new version, but that introduces similar complexities, especially for users who already paid & downloaded the previous "version". So in a big way, the App Store de-incentivizes any kind of transition away from a subscription-based business model.
The "new versions" business model vs. subscription may be similar cost to consumer (it wouldn't support monthly users), but it would allow consumers to only update when their ready and could continue using an old app version (especially on older devices) as long as they'd like. If a customer really likes the software, they'd likely buy the new version to access new features & device support before too long anyhow
One way which feels fair that I have seen companies do is provide "Maintenance".
Premium paid support offerings which also includes upgrades to any versions released during your contract duration. It's enterprisey, and maybe weird for a camera app (how much support could you possibly really need?).
I see cases where it makes sense...but I also see the need for development to get paid their salery, and once you have reached all the users you can....their is no new user growth....and if your just selling based off a one time fee then that means you got very little income except the random guy who might donate, but a company shouldn't rely on donations to keep products alive.
If the thing needs updates or changes regularly say once very 6 months....due to changes in standard or just keeping things updated....this stuff costs money to keep developers paid.
My crude C program I wrote that converts an input between celcius or Fahrenheit is not really going to change. Unless I want to also support data inputs other than floating point numbers, I don't need to update or modify anything. But other stuff is more complex and might change due to standards, advancements, and the needs of the users.
On iOS, it gets even worse as there never were high prices to begin with. Which means that the OTP model was never very sustainable.
To me that's the fairest. First, it incentives them to make a good product, and keep developing it as opposed to just throwing it out there and then not updating.
And secondly it's also fair for the customer. If I don't find something useful I might stop using it after a week, but I paid the full price, same as if I found it useful for years.
> If the thing needs updates or changes regularly say once very 6 months....due to changes in standard or just keeping things updated....this stuff costs money to keep developers paid.
The problem is of course, that the industry has settled into a nash equilibrium of constantly changing things, so regular people have to continuously update software, as a way to charge rents, on top of whatever productive improvements they provide.
In-App Purchases Yearly $11.99 Monthly $2.99 One Time Purchase $59.99
Personally, for smaller developers, I attribute this more to ignorance than malice (greed). Pricing is hard so they just look around and pick what they see happening around them without taking a moment even to think, forget about doing actual research.
The alternative is charging to write software, which is actually how most people (employees) make money writing software. Corporations take advantage of the difference between paying people to write software, and charging people over and over again to use the same software that has already been written.
people (including me) complain about apple taking a 30% cut from developers, but for that money, they do make that part easy.
Putting on my Older Person hat for a moment, software from indie publishers used to cost in the ballpark of $40 in the late 1980s (that's ~$100 in 2024 dollars after adjusting for inflation). $100 for a single version of a single app. When the next point release comes out, the publisher might give you a discount of 50%, so it might only cost you $50. A major release was often required for compatibility with a new OS version.
All the software we used back in the day? We spent significant money on it.
Do you think apps like these pomodoro apps would sell in sustainable quantities if it were $100 for major releases and $50 for point releases? What if it were $100 to get the current version every time iOS did a major version upgrade?
Or is it more likely that these apps would simply not exist?
People say they want one-time purchases, but the small $ subscriptions are more consumer-friendly than is immediately apparent. And they support a vastly more comprehensive software ecosystem.
The thing is, all software constantly needs new updates. If not platform-driven, then security, bug fixes, etc.
The more niche (like a pomodoro app), the fewer users over which to amortize the dev costs. A lifetime fee of $1, sold to a huge audience of 100k paid users, will pay for ~1 year of a single dev in the US, perhaps 2-3 years of a developer in a low-cost country. And then where does the money come from for updates in year 4 and beyond?
Subscription payments recognize the realities that a) development never ends for most apps that are in use and b) developers are not going to be free in the future just because the publisher only charged once.
I challenge you to demonstrate the Pomodoro app that has a full time dev effort for a year, and then requires anything more than piecemeal bug fixes or maybe a recompile in that four years of support...
You have already been paid everything you will ever get paid for work you did in 2021. Next year, I want you to do an unpredictable amount of work to support the 2025 iOS. How much will you charge me? Where will I get the money to pay you? Why would I spend it on this instead of something else where I might see a return?
Similarly, in the 1990s, things like Myst and Sim City 2000 were $40 each. Shareware at the time (mostly indie) were usually $20 or less; often $5, and sometimes fun/silly things like postcardware or beerware.
Why go that far back? The average computer back then cost thousands of dollars, much more than what an iPhone costs now in inflation-adjusted terms. The App Store is not a new invention, it's been around since 2008, and for year apps were sold for a flat one-time fee.
The reason everything is a subscription now is because accountants decided that recurring revenue was how every startup should be valued, and every vendor adjusted their pricing structure accordingly.
(The example of the Pomodoro app with the subscription is pretty dubious, though.)
Because this is the era before really any major software was sold by subscription. Even 2008 was a hybrid era where some Web software was already subscription-based. Consumer behavior had already started to shift by 2008.
> for year apps were sold for a flat one-time fee.
This model also makes a lot of assumptions about where user data is stored and who is paying for that storage. Many apps have non-trivial backend requirements to support very normal use cases like "I also would like to access this from a Web browser sometimes." Those requirements cost money on an ongoing basis. One-time purchases are not a good fit for this either. We do not see many one-time purchases of Web software; many mobile apps are essentially parts of a larger whole that includes other modes of access to underlying services.
Whether it's ethical for developers to cater to that kind of helpless behavior is another question.
Software costs time and money. People complain that they don't want the same uninspired corporate created junk – and then they balk at paying indie developers a reasonable amount for apps.
So much work goes into this stuff! It's so tempting for indie devs to just take the high paying job, and then congrats – no more unique and interesting apps like this.
Most people don’t balk at paying fair prices for an app, but the definition has drifted so far that €7/month (€84/year) is described as “fair” for a simple timer, and that is plain absurd.
Halide goes for €69 one-time purchase, or €12,50/year. For professional software that is really well designed and is actually kept up to date. This should be the benchmark.
> People are greedy af
I hope the irony of these two statements isn't lost on you
Just this morning I searched for "Strava" and the top result was some random hiking app.
I saw the announcement pretty early on and when I started typing in "kino" into the App Store search, the first autocomplete suggestion was the rest of the app's title in the listing "- pro video camera", and if I clicked that one it showed the app first (well, first result after an ad)
> commonly used in internet slang to refer to a good film.
I've never heard Kino used that way personally.
I like supporting independent software studios like yours who try not to sell out, so bought it without hesitation, even though I don't shoot a lot of video with my iPhone. This will probably make me experiment more with video.
The main site doesn't use scroll-jacking, i.e. scrolling feels like walking through a muddy swamp.
The other effects are subtle enough that they don't make me want to leave the site, i.e. make my laptop fan spin more violently.
Really tells how much they care about their craft
Also not mentioning the platform anywhere in the title or even article body itself is inheritly deceiving.
Also transparency in a discussions forum is objectively a good thing so extending the title would clearly be beneficial to everyone involved.
Someone from the company said in another thread it's already enough of a hassle dealing with all the possible camera configurations across different iPhone models, and iOS updates breaking things. I think there's a reason you don't see apps like this on Android.
They're having issues with even the iPhone's variance in APIs they need.
I can't imagine how bad it'd be if they had to support all the different Android hardware and OS version combinations.
Since the phone's cameras are fixed aperture, you lose one leg of the exposure triangle. Instead, they lean heavily on the shutter speed as ISO is also a function of the chip. Increasing the shutter speed also increase the jello effect from the rolling shutter. Using an ND filter helps. If you find yourself without an ND filter but you have your sun glasses, shoot your camera through a lens on your sunglasses. It'll be awkward but it will help. Bonus points if your sunglasses are polarized. You can rotate your sunglasses to "dial" in the effect similar to a circular polarizer. I'd assume at this point that there are a plethora of lens filters available for cheap.
Surely that would only affect polarized light, like glare from reflections, no?
Possibly that's all you're saying (I understand the general purpose of polarized lenses) but it sounded like you were suggesting you could make the whole scene darker -- and thus improve the motion blur effect -- by rotating the lens.
Did you read over this "Bonus points if your sunglasses are polarized."? I'm not talking about regular polarized lenses in your glasses. I specifically said the world sunglasses multiple times. The entire point of sunglasses is to make the whole scene darker. I really don't know how to describe this any more plainly.
Obviously the sunglasses alone make the scene darker. You're the one who brought up dialing it in with polarized lenses.
"I read that as "
that's an issue where you're not familiar with the subject, and have misinterpreted common words used by those more familiar with the subject.
That would be true if the iPhone's lens also has polarization...
https://www.seattleu.edu/scieng/physics/physics-demos/optics...
These folks have a stellar reputation, and I'll be buying this app on that (and the I-was-expecting-more-digits price) alone, but I would have enjoyed seeing some kind of short film "shot on Kino". If only to see some professional work.
Funny enough, the website for the app is https://www.shotwithkino.com/, but it also doesn't have feature any videos shot with Kino.
The name they've chosen for the app, Kino, is a bit weird to me. When I hear the word Kino, I immediately start to think about lighting as that's how people refer to lights from Kinoflo which gained popularity from their fluorescent lights in the years before LEDs took over.
Example: Movie XYZ is pure kino
Borrowed from French cinéma, clipping of cinématographe (term coined by the Lumière brothers in the 1890s), from Ancient Greek κίνημα (kínēma, “movement”) + γράφω (gráphō, “write, record”). Compare German Kino (“cinema”), ultimately from the same Greek source.
However, the advertisement in the blog post made by Sandwich Video was entirely shot on Kino.
The UI on the iOS Kino app is beautiful, crafted, and elegant. The UI on MotionCam (even after the update) is functional, brutalist, and purely an engineering driven, unstyled Android 4.4 UI elements style.
But MotionCam Pro gives full control, and even a RAW mode which wouldn't be possible on iPhone. You can even do ProRes (but it doesn't work very well for long unless you have a new phone with good cooling).
For the purpose I use it for (magnifying glass/telescope, using S23 Ultra), it's wonderful. But I always wished that the two worlds of Android and iOS development styles would collide for a moment....
Hopefully Flutter will fix that because the difference in usability is night and day. It's just a shame the Dart ecosystem is so dead.
https://github.com/android/compose-samples
>Hopefully Flutter will fix that because the difference in usability is night and day. It's just a shame the Dart ecosystem is so dead.
I don't see how the difference is night and day when they both use declarative UI's. Whether you use Jetpack Compose/Kotlin or Flutter/Dart is really up to your objectives. As for your claim that the Dart ecosystem is dead - I really don't get that, since Flutter/Dart is the #1 cross-platform development environment.
[citation needed]. I looked into Jetpack Compose a year or two ago and it was way too immature then to use in production. I guess maybe that's improved a bit but we're talking about existing apps here. They don't magically move to Jetpack Compose. Someone has to update them. How much would you bet that MotionCam Pro uses Jetpack Compose?
https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose
Calling Jetpack Compose immature is amusing considering all of the apps that have been built with it. Additionally, it's been one of the primary pillars of Google I/O for the past 5 years.
>I guess maybe that's improved a bit but we're talking about existing apps here. They don't magically move to Jetpack Compose.
You don't need to. With Jetpack Compose there's no need to completely rewrite your entire UI. If you want to convert an old UI to Jetpack Compose you can gradually update parts of it and have both co-exist.
>How much would you bet that MotionCam Pro uses Jetpack Compose?
Judging from the UI I don't see any Jetpack Compose UI elements.
My Thinkphone has a pretty awesome camera and native camera app with integrated RAW output, but these apps do often provide some features and polish beyond what's available in that tool. For example, I was just trying to take a long-exposure photo of the aurora (visible a couple weeks ago here in Michgan) and the limits on even the manual controls had ranges that limited what I could do. Spectre (or its equivalent) would have been awesome to have.
I know you can “lock white balance” but it is still nudging it towards neutral before locking.
Unfortunately there’s no white balance option in Kino, but I already love its Auto Motion and manual focus. Maybe you’d be open to adding a white balance control too?
I also think it would make sense to have an option to persist the chosen white balance even after the app is quit. Same on Halide. I prefer “daylight” on all my shots [1], but I have to switch from AWB every time.
Sorry for the premature feature request, Kino is awesome anyway, the UI is so so good! and thank you for launching it with 50% off!
I have this problem CONSTANTLY with the iPhone 15 Pro Max, not when filming, but when doing everyday tasks. Something about the edge of the phone is such that a bit of my palm goes over just enough of the screen to trigger gestures, and now the YouTube video I’m watching is double speed or something I’m reading scrolls to the top for no reason.
I’m generally good about not dropping my phone (knock on wood) so I’d rather not get a case just to fix this weird touch sensitivity issue. As far as I recall this wasn’t an issue with my iPhone 12 Pro Max.
(Why "former"? I switched over to Apple's Camera app for the bulk of my casual photography when Apple introduced Live Photos, since I really like the added vividness of having a video moment attached.)
I don't do many videos, and the Camera app (along with their Action Mode software video stabilisation) seems to do everything I need it to, so I'm not sure if I would be able to use any of the "pro" features here at all.
At a subscription or a significantly higher price point, I wouldn't.
Plural of anecdote isn't data, but anecdote is better than nothing, so there you have it.
The part I've italicized above should be "chooses".
Great looking app though!
> For one, there are artists who sculpts the contrast and color
emphasis mine
Taking pictures with a phone is unpleasant enough, but shooting movies is another world of pain.
Instead, I think the overall goal is to increase the video quality for times when you don’t have the chance to carefully consider which camera to use from a large selection of available cameras. Your iPhone is already in your pocket.
Question I do have though: is the purchase done through the app store or your website, and if its done via the app store or website, can I use it on as many of my own devices attached to the account? Or is it more of a 1 liscense per device?
Second: the presents you have sound nice and you mention that "Of course you can turn off Instant Grade to save the original Apple Log footage, allowing you the flexibility to change your look in our video reviewer. " does this support saving the original apple log footage, then opening that footage in the app and being able to preview how the different effects would look? And can I export the effected footage as a copy of the original that way I can have both the original and graded footage without overwriting the original data?
It's not in the title, but it really should be.
> On a technical level, why does video shot on an iPhone look different than one shot on a big Hollywood camera?
...and then they launch into color grading and whatnot.
The real answer:
Because the pixel pitch on a cinema digital camera is four times the area of the pixels on an iPhone which allows for much greater light gathering which means lower noise, and the sensor is far less limited by diffraction.
Because the iPhone lens, being so tiny, has almost zero depth of field and that looks like shit.
Because the people operating the camera are very good at cinematography.
...not because of some software.
I know it’s a quick aside but it’s important for people in the trade to stand by each other.
On a different note, I am curious though how the page manages to use so much copyright content though. I always think that’s a risky move.
It's called fair use. They are static shots and not even close to the magical "8 seconds" rule. They are providing dramatic examples that many people are familiar with. Showing the before/after of something your mom shot means nothing to people. Showing extremely famous examples immediately lets people know what is possible and to what extent.
I see nothing wrong with any of what was used or how it was used but especially why it was used.
Even with fair use, it’s still good form to attribute it. But more importantly , those images are intermixed among product clips/videos which can fall on the other side of fair use because it may give the impression that they are associated with the product.
That can be a tight line to walk and so it’s again usually best to specifically call out that they are there for illustrative purposes.
Whether or not it's described in the text of copyright law, it is a common concept people are familiar.
Regardless, the fair use laws are very loose and tend to vary depending on the medium type and association with product.
Anyway , I get what you’re saying but given it’s part of a product page, it should at the very least, call out that they’re illustrative and not actually associated.
If you were confused by the image as them trying to take credit, then boy, I don't know.
I’m just stating that they’re intermixing it and that can play into whether it is fair use. I’m not saying that I personally am confused. I’m just saying that intermixing it may give people the wrong assumption if they’re not familiar with these films. Remember, the matrix came out 25 years ago. There’s many people who will likely never see it but will be working in film/cinema etc and use this.
I’m not ascribing malice either, just that it’s good form in the industry to delineate clearly.
Maybe take it down a few notches or step away from the keyboard.
Are you referring to the shots from the Matrix and Blade Runner? In this case, I think we’re commenting on the source material, which falls under fair use. I think the imagery is iconic enough that it feels a bit silly to say “this is from The Matrix,” but I could be convinced otherwise.
Of course it’s obvious that the Matrix isn’t shot with Kino , but I think it’s still good form to caveat that it’s there for illustrative purposes.
Again, PITA, but given the iOS infrastructure, I'm surprised it works at all.
On the one hand it is talking about how until the iPhone 15 Pro one of the issues is that you were stuck with whatever version of the video your iPhone decided to record, but then it is talking about how this recording app is not just recording straight log and doing its own magic? What am I missing here, arn't they doing the exact thing that they were saying was bad in the first place?
Related to that, they seem to talk about LUT's but if with this we are saying that we can use these prebaked LUT's what exactly does that get me over using prebaked LUT's in my video editor?
I am curious how this compares to BlackMagic Camera.
Also curious how this will standup when Final Cut Pro Camera launches later this year (but that is obviously only valuable if you use FCP).
For $10, I may download it and give it a shot. But I am not fully sure I am seeing the value proposition here and I feel like there has to be something I am really missing here. If it isnt targeting the pro market as some commenters are saying, then what is the point of this over the built in camera app?
For context, I do my recording on an iPhone 15 pro max so maybe this isnt targeted at me?
Obviously video is harder, but the "analog film" UI looks mighty familiar... ;)
Thanks for not bundling spyware like everyone does in apps these days. I’m happy to support anyone who isn’t spying on users.
I don’t use Halide specifically because it does phone home (and is IAP subscriptionware cancer).
Even though I shoot log and use Resolve, this might be fun for quick stuff without a round trip through the desktop computer.
What you want is the Privacy Policy, which links to https://halide.com/privacy/, which is a 404 page.
The only time Halide communicates with a server is when we do a controlled rollout of a feature, and anonymized reporting when a capture fails. I’d prefer we didn’t need either but 1) the App Store model doesn’t accommodate safe rollouts and 2) iPhone capture and photo library frameworks regularly break, and sometimes the only way to get a fix escalated is to have numbers in hand.
If you don’t want to subscribe to Halide, though, there is a one time purchase option in app.
Kino costs $10 for perpetual, for reference.
But when I started recording, the app crashed. It crashed again. It crashed again. It crashes while I'm still recording. This was very frustrating for me.
P.S –– I use iPhone 13
> Out of the box, Apple Log footage looks really flat. It's not meant to look good. It's meant to be edited later.
The before/after is about how you can apply each of those different prebuilt LUTs immediately with a tap, not about comparing how much better edited log looks than unedited log.
Yes, it's because you haven't seen raw log video before. It'll look very washed out when filming in log (and typically when previewing recent shots) but then in post-processing you'll actually tune the colors (called "color grading", in case you wanna seek out more about it).
That's only because it's not viewed in the right color space? (I'm using color space in the ICC sense to also include the transfer function).
For some reason video folks seem really intent on creating their own terms for everything that photographers already standardized with ICC. And to make things worse they decided to make the EOTF and OETF not be inverses of each other.
Of course things will look off if you display a log-encoded image on a display that uses a power-gamma. You have to linearize the input (invert the log-encoding) then delinearize (inverse power) before sending it to the display. With ICC-aware tools (that most photographer uses) this conversion is done automatically for you (e.g. colorsync on mac).
But for some reason video workflows are not icc color managed. As I understand the oetf is basically unused entirely: since edits are made under bt1886 conditions, effectively baking in this bt1886 assumption on the viewer side as well. This seems to be the exact opposite of how ICC workflows work, where regardless of the monitor color profile the editor uses, all edits are transferred to the underlying source color profile of the image.
The only page I've ever seen which actually acknowledges that "log encoding" is just an alternative to gamma encoding is https://imatest.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KB/pages/114161421..., as I discussed in an earlier rant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37877599
It's like that because it's the log encoding is not in a display-ready color space. Many modern cameras can apply LUT directly in the viewfinder though, so it's less of a nuisance today. In reality, it isn't an issue, just beginners get surprised when they see it the first time.
> For some reason video folks seem really intent on creating their own terms for everything
Which to me makes sense. If I'm looking for terms that can apply to many areas, it becomes harder to find the right thing. I much prefer separated terms than the approach than one term being used in many areas, so it gets easier to search and talk about.
> actually acknowledges that "log encoding" is just an alternative to gamma encoding
Not sure they are 100% alternatives though, but I'm much more familiar with log encoding than gamma encoding. As far as I understand, log encoding uses a logarithmic curve to capture a wide dynamic range, preserving detail in shadows and highlights for extensive post-production grading. In contrast, gamma encoding applies a non-linear curve that approximates human vision, producing footage with natural contrast and color suitable for immediate viewing and minimal post-processing.
But, I could also misunderstand the differences, and would be happy to be told otherwise :)
IIUC it's a similar bit optimization scheme to allocate bits fairly across the entire dynamic range. The only difference is the curve used (log vs gamma). You are right in that "log" is probably more uniform from a physics perspective (something about each f-stop getting same # of bits) while "gamma" is supposedly more uniform from a perceptual perspective (something about steven's power rule). Note that even storing things in floating point is also effectively a form of log encoding since density of floating point numbers halves when you double the range.
To me they feel more similar than they are different, which is why it's annoying that there's this completely parallel set of terminology used for photography vs video-editing and I haven't been able to find a rosetta stone to translate between the two (part of this is undoubtedly because icc color management requires digital computers, while film making existed as a field long before that)
* log-encoding :: gamma encoding
* EOTF/OETF :: Gamma/transfer function (n.b. eotf not necessary inverse of oetf, unlike gamma)
* LUT application :: ICC color space conversion
* Video-workflow (make edits directly in target color space) :: Photo workflow (transfer edits to source color space)
* NCLC tag :: ICC color profile
It's unclear if you already support this, but I would love an option to automatically bake graded footage back down to HEVC. I will never edit most of the video I take, I just want to dial in the look I want.
But the app did create a video file that has audio backed in at 2x the speed. So halfway true the video the audio stops already.
I guess this is an interesting app to keep eyes on after a few updates.
(Stock old Lenovo laptop with Intel iGPU and stock base-model X250 panel.)
Realistically I don't blame em, but it sucks to see IOS get all the cool apps. With emulators coming to iOS I know my next phone will probably be an iPhone
I myself feel the same, with emus on iOS the only missing class of software at this point is like... Blink+V8 instead of WebKit+JSC as a browser choice.
Edit: i just bought it
Seems nice upon first use but either way it’s worth the $10 as a lesson in beautiful UIs
Hehe nice job on the Apple lingo signaling
> a tent pole project — the company’s special, internal label that it uses to organize employees around once-in-a-decade initiatives
normal iPhone output is great looking just not "the look"
I prefer without a comparison of iPhones version.
I already had VideoLUT and LumaFX so any kind of grading can be done afterwards.
I never had Halide.
Just saying, I’m trying to understand how Kino improves on this?
We'll have to see where it goes, from here.