Apple has spent years promising (and delivering) a pro-level camera experience on its iPhone, and for proof of Apple’s success on that front, you don’t have to look very far.
Steven Soderbergh shot the entire 1 hour and 40 minutes of his feature film, Unsane, on an iPhone; Sean Baker’s Tangerine was shot in 2015 using three iPhone 5s; there’s a high chance that the YouTube content you have playing in the background as you’re reading this was shot on iPhone; the list goes on.
While those are all impressive examples of real cinematic or pro-level experiences done entirely on a phone, lots of the real magic happens after the fact — in “post,” to use movie parlance.
And that part, well… it’s a bit trickier than just whipping out your phone and pressing record. But, if developers at Kino have anything to say about it, maybe it doesn’t have to be.
And the award for best iPhone app goes to…
Kino, for those who haven’t used it yet, is a camera app in Apple’s App Store — or more recently, the winner of Apple’s annual award for Best iPhone App in 2024. Lux, the developers of the Kino app, took home the annual prize on Tuesday night during a ceremony in New York.
As you might imagine, Best iPhone App is a crowded category to win an award for any app, but doubly so for one that focuses on your camera.
Camera editing apps for the iPhone are a dime-a-dozen. Still, Kino makes its case to consumers by promising not merely a pro-level, cinematic video capture experience, but an easy one.
The app takes advantage of a recent upgrade to the iPhone called Apple Log, a video format that retains more digital information than shooting in a standard .mov file.
The idea is that Apple Log, because of the beefed-up amount of data, allows users to make more granular edits to their videos, tweaking things like color grading, dynamic range, and more.
The problem Kino solves so well is that not everyone has the editing chops to actually take advantage of that newfound granularity. That’s where Kino comes in.
Instead of having to dig deep into the settings of a more nuanced software suite like Adobe Final Cut, Kino, by default, uses various presets for a set-it-and-forget-it kind of approach. The result is a video with a satisfyingly cinematic look without having to belabor your footage in post.
Ben Sandofsky, CEO of Lux, tells Laptop Mag the app should appeal to people — parents with younger kids, for example — who want more from their iPhone camera but might not have the time to invest in it.
“There are apps that let you do everything, but they’re really designed for film majors or camera operators who have tons of experience,” Sandofsky says. “There weren’t many apps that made it approachable for us, or other parents, where you can just tap a button and get results with minimal fuss.”
(As for that “parents” bit, Lux’s one-line bio on its website reads as such: “Made with love in California and New York by two dads.”)
If the “we do it all so you don’t have to” approach sounds limiting, arguably, the best part about Kino is that you can do more if you choose. While using the app can be as simple as pulling out your phone, tapping Kino, selecting a preset, and then pressing record, you can still get granular by digging deeper into the settings.
“It’s mostly people who are getting introduced to , but as they grow and learn as a filmmaker, the app grows with them,” Sandofsky says.
For example, if you know how to read RGB waveforms, adjust your ISO, shutter, or tinker with framerates, you can tweak all of those things in the app to change the look and feel of your video.
And if you don’t know how to do all of that? Well, Kino has a solution for that, too, in the form of tutorials and the recent addition of more onboarding instructions that walk new users through color grading and how to use other features inside the app.
What’s next for Kino?
Despite having won a major App Store award from Apple, Kino is still in its early stages. The app has only been out for six months and according to Sandofsky, the team is still growing and learning from user feedback.
If you need some reassurance that Kino can continue to evolve and get better, you’ll be happy to know that Lux, which developed Kino, has a pretty strong pedigree. The developer is the same company behind Halide, which was released seven years ago and is arguably one of the most popular photo editing apps you can download on your iPhone.
For now, Sandofsky says Kino is being conservative about which features it adds and which it doesn’t, telling Laptop Mag that adding too much too soon could “get in the way of making Kino approachable for our parents and people who are non-camera nerds.”
Sandofsky was hesitant to reveal too much about what Kino does have in store for the future other than rounding out current capabilities with features like more location tagging or finer audio control, but assured Laptop Mag that whatever the company adds to Kino, the emphasis will always be on simplification.
“It’s very easy to make a hard app but very hard to make an easy app,” Sandofsky says.
