Halide says it will never support video, so it’s launching Kino instead

Halide cofounder Ben Sandofsky has a message for everyone who’s asked if video capture will be added to the popular iPhone photography app: “Never.” Lux, the development team behind Halide, is instead working on Kino — a new, dedicated video capture app for iPhones that aims to provide professional recording features now that Apple supports log video encoding. Its release is scheduled for February… if all goes as planned.

Just as the Halide photography app was released in 2017 to coincide with Apple adding RAW support for iPhone, Kino’s development was prompted by Apple announcing support for log video encoding in September, a format that allows more detail to be preserved for post-production color grading. In Sandofsky’s own words, “Log video is to filmmakers what RAW is to photographers” — a powerful file format that allows for more enhanced editing capabilities. At present, Apple Log — the company’s own version of the log video encoding format — is only supported on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Information about Kino’s features is slim, and pricing hasn’t been revealed yet. Sandofsky says he used a “simple version” of the Kino app to record his video announcement but didn’t run through any details. The team behind Kino has set a deadline to launch the app by February 2024 to avoid any delays that may be caused by the arrival of Sandofsky’s first child (congrats!) and will be openly sharing developmental updates along the way. “We have an idea for what we want the app to be, but we don’t know how we’re going to get there,” said Sandofsky.