The Makers of Halide are Launching a Video Capture App for iPhone Called Kino
The co-founder of the iPhone photography app Halide says that it will “never” support video. However, the company is working on a separate video capture app.
Ben Sandofsky announced yesterday that Lux, the company behind Halide, is now working on an app called Kino which will provide professional recording features for video capture on the iPhone.
The launch of the iPhone 15 came with the announcement that Apple will start supporting log video encoding — which is to videographers what RAW is to photographers. Back in 2017, when Apple added RAW photo support for the iPhone that’s when the idea of Halide was hatched. And now that Apple is essentially doing the same for video, Kino will aim to take advantage of that.
“In the past, the way we have developed apps has been very much in Apple’s style, where we will develop in secrecy and out of the blue make this huge spectacle out of the launch,” says Sandofsky.
“This time we are going to do things a little bit differently, we have to launch this by February because we have a really important deadline: I’m having a kid.”
Sandofsky says he has an idea of what Kino will be like but is unsure how the company will get there, so he is going to show the community the app’s development.
“What if we show you some of the engineering problems, what if we show you some of the design iterations and the thoughts that are going into building this app, and then you can see — hopefully in two months — what comes out of it.”
So far, Apple Log — which is what Apple calls their log video ending format — is only supported on the brand-new iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
When asked by PetaPixel about what exposure the iPhone is choosing when recording in log, since filmmakers will want to know if they want to maximize dynamic range as much as possible without overexposing, or if they want to push the shadows as much as possible to minimize noise. Jon McCormack, Vice President of Camera Software Engineering at Apple said: “We go for a middle-ground exposure. When you go into log, there’s no tone mapping so you can have much more precise control over what your exposure is.”
It should also be noted that while Apple expects the ProRes log encoding to be very easy to grade, the company will also be providing LUT profiles to editors on September 22.
