Thanks - that seems like a must-have for anyone anyone working with this level of tools. Glad to hear it's on the way. I would love to be able to use this with both external mics and storage, but I'm not sure how well the iPhone would handle both of those through a hub.
Are you going to integrate the Atomos/TCS wireless system? Apogee does for audio in their apps, for example. And Zoom recorders support it. Would be nice to go with the emerging wireless standard for timecode.
For a video recording app, it's an interesting marketing decision that there's only one video on the page. And at least on my computer, it doesn't play, I only hear the audio.
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.
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.
I get the use of Kino, and that's why I caveated the statement with "weird to me" immediately followed by the specific reasons it is weird to me. I did not say that it is weird because it has nothing to do with anything. It's just when someone that's been in the production world and familiar with equipment names and brands, Kino definitely has a specific meaning on first hearing it.
Kino is directly or extremely similar to the word for cinema in many languages, including German, Polish, Slovak, Czech, Danish, Croatian, and Finnish, to name a few. The word cinema itself is ultimately from the hard-K Greek kínēma:
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.
We definitely had more video examples planned, but production fell through at the 11th hour, and we decided it was important to ship before WWDC. So it goes.
However, the advertisement in the blog post made by Sandwich Video was entirely shot on Kino.
Making the decisions like that for getting exposure from an event with a pre-release version is always a scary thing. Luckily, WWDC attendees will be much more understanding of early versions vs the public. Good luck!
Do other manufactures shoot in the log mode that this is specifically taking advantage of? If not, there's no point of it from any other millions of apple on the Play store.
There are apps for Android that allow you to record RAW video (eg: MotionCam Pro). You'll need an equivalent Android though. A high end Samsung, Sony, OnePlus, etc, supports this. A random $50-100 Android phone probably won't.
That's a super good point. My guess is any shop building apps like this are going to be doing it using some very OS specific system frameworks and are going to have a lot of domain knowledge in either android or iOS. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to pivot given the cost I suspect.
That lux camera company is a very Apple heavy shop and they seem to only make apps that cost 10-20 dollars plus. Why would they waste time on android when a large corpus of their skills and codebase are already probably in ObjC and Swift programmed against many of Apple's iOS frameworks? To sell a $20 camera app to android users who are pretty much guaranteed to not buy it? Total waste of time to bring software like this with this payment model to Android IMHO.
Wow, thats a leap and for the record you said they are poor not me.
I'm not saying anything that the sales numbers don't already say (app sales, subscriptions, click through rates, anything): Android users just don't buy as much stuff with their phones, it doesn't mean they're poor it just means they don't like to click pay through the hamster's wheel of mobile purchases as much as iOS users.
They're over 70% marketshare world wide and they produce less than half the revenue. I am not sure how the math breaks down the odds that an individual android user will buy a $20 app, but it doesn't seem great.
My point is if the average Android user were even half as likely to buy then the numbers would be about the same plausibly, they wouldn't be half the revenue. I suspect if you're a small shop focused on apps for the top end of phones you just don't have time for all this.
Statistics don't tell the complete story. A large portion of that 70% is from developing countries that cannot afford to purchase apps, let alone purchase an iPhone. A fair comparison would be the US, where iOS and Android are fairly even.
Even if that were true, if you had to choose one platform to serve in NA you’re better off selling to iOS users because they make up a majority of North American mobile phone users.
It depends on the functionality of the app. I'd choose Flutter so that I could port to multiple platforms with one code base. But, if it was a camera app like Kino then, of course, I would pick 1 platform.
Yeah, that makes sense. FWIW I think flutter is pretty cool. I think this sort of thing is only a concern when you have apps that have to use a lot of hardware specific features. Even if they wanted to bring Kino to Android it’d probably require whatever equally expensive and fancy Samsung device hardware I suspect.
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.
Fair use gets tricky when you intermix it like this. Though I must first call out that there’s no actual 8 second rule.
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.
Notice the quotes around the "8 seconds" rule. It's not a rule, but that's what it is known as. I mainly know it from the audio world, but it was a common theme/trope/meme in radio shows about using music without royalties.
Whether or not it's described in the text of copyright law, it is a common concept people are familiar.
Nitpickiest of nits: given your intended description, the quotes should be around “rule” not “8 second”. When around “rule”, that implies it’s not really a rule. When around “8 second” it implies that it’s not 8 seconds exactly or it’s what it’s colloquially called, but it would still be a rule.
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.
Do you really think that this company is implying that they made The Matrix or Dune? It is clearly just an example used to aid in the discussion of the surrounding text. There is no claim of "we used this software to make Dune". If they had, you can assume they would have put that out in some sort of call out in their marketing.
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.
You are reading way more into these comments than is actually there. Just because someone challenges something you've written does not mean you are being attacked. There's no notches to take it down from.
On copyright, we go out of our way to generate original graphics for our posts, but if we do use an excerpt of other people’s content, we keep it brief and link back to source for the full details.
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.
The matrix, blade runner and the Nicolas cage shot that I can’t identify personally. I think it would still be reasonable to have attribution and/or also say that the projects in question weren’t shot with Kino.
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.
Oh man, I wish the app was available on the iphone 15 pro too. I keep holding off buying that external HDMI monitor for the A7SIII, and that might be just the solution to keep the camera bag small...
"Now, it's not always possible for Kino to pick cinematic settings, such as when shooting in bright daylight."
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.
> Bonus points if your sunglasses are polarized. You can rotate your sunglasses to "dial" in the effect similar to a circular polarizer.
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.
> but it sounded like you were suggesting you could make the whole scene darker
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.
Huh? I'm talking about being able to "dial in the effect." I read that as "dialing in the darkness" (as it relates to motion blur). That's what I'm talking about.
Obviously the sunglasses alone make the scene darker. You're the one who brought up dialing it in with polarized lenses.
It sounds like you are not familiar with how a circular polarizer works. By rotating the lens, you are changing the angle that the polarizing filter blocks. At one angle you might block the reflections from windows/water, rotating 90° usually will start to effect the sky so the blue gets deeper. So as you rotate your sunglasses, you see the similar effect.
"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.
In typical Android fashion, this app is essentially the mathematical inverse of the iPhone version.
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....
I've never done any iOS dev but I always assumed it was partly because the Android GUI toolkit (views, fragments etc.) is just SO awful that it just isn't feasible to make nice UIs. Certainly in the apps I've made there's absolutely no way I would invest time into animations, custom widgets, etc.
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.
Your concept of Android development looks to be stuck in the 4.4 days. Jetpack Compose and its declarative UI is how modern Android apps are developed.
>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.
> Jetpack Compose and its declarative UI is how modern Android apps are developed.
[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?
>Jetpack Compose is Android’s recommended modern toolkit for building native UI. It simplifies and accelerates UI development on Android. Quickly bring your app to life with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs.
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.
I download a lot of iOS apps using AppRaven and I can tell you that 95% of them are extremely poorly designed from a UI perspective - I'd even call them ugly. A lot of them don't even follow Apple's UI guidelines.
Is there an equivalent to Halide or Spectre (for raw still photos/long-exposure photos) for Android?
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.
Just a heads up, the "privacy label" does not necessarily match the actual privacy policy. It's not required to match, and there is no accountability mechanism when it doesn't.
Hope you enjoy Kino! To clear up a few things about Halide…
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.
The Halide one time purchase is $60, and I carry a full frame mirrorless (rx1) with me at all times. Also, while I understand your QA issue, I won’t spend money on apps that phone home against my will, on basis of principle.
Yes I'm aware of the prices. You not liking the price of an app doesn't make it "cancer". Personally I think the fact that they have found a model that works and that doesn't require releasing entire new versions of the app, keeps legacy users' versions up-to-date and bug-free while continuing to deliver new features and improvements should be celebrated. Especially from an independent developer team who clearly loves the craft.
As a long time amateur photographer (using physical cameras and lenses), I have Halide (by the same company) on my iOS home screen for when I need to take a real phono on my iPhone. I use it all the time without issue. And would recommend it to any photographer.
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).
Sorry you ran into that. I distinctly remember testing the 13 mini, due to notch layout issues, so this is unexpected. As soon as the crash reports come in, we’ll dig into that.
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.
I tried with my iPhone 12 mini 17.5.1 BNW. It didn't crash, but it looked like it had and then came back with a weird error (sorry, I didn’t capture it).
My phone is due for an upgrade soon, so it’s not a big deal at the moment.
Definitely fragmented, even within the same generation and software version there are clearly meaningful hardware differences, but more like "dry mud" cracked apart than "grand canyon" cracked apart in comparison to other options. Still something you have to deal with though, no getting around that.
If you stick to the high level "Hey, take a photo for me" APIs, it isn't a problem. If you want to take advantage of hardware specific features, the iPhone camera system varies from generation to generation, and sometimes within a single generation. On top of this, the AV frameworks have a mountain of undefined behavior which easily breaks with iOS updates. There are tons of iOS and model specific code branches that have cropped up in Halide over the years.
That said, it doesn't hold a candle to Android fragmentation. It's a major reason we will not touch the platform.
This looks really promising, hope all goes great! My only concern is reading that you do collect crash reports despite being privacy-focused. How much information is there to identify the picture/video taken or the device/person?
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.
Their privacy manifest shows that they do not collect any data. So they are either not using Firebase or similar for crash analytics, or their privacy manifest is inaccurate and should be reported.
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.
Same phone and same OS version down to the patch number. I’ve noticed UI hangs and stutter when changing the grades, and BNW in particular seems to cause the biggest issues. Not yet experienced a crash even if I flick between grades in quick succession.
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!
I paid for Halide and almost immediately afterward, they announced a policy of locking new features made after whatever version you had bought unless you bought it a second time.
It's the only app I've ever bought whose developer has done that bullshit.
For every couple year major versions (with decently advanced notice it's coming and/or a recency allowance) I think it's fair to charge anew but for minor improvements over the lifecycle of a major version I think it's fair to want to buy everything that will come in the major version up front if you're making a one time purchase. Tons of software is this way from Sublime to Windows to ZBrush to an absolute crapload of games. In this model a one time purchase is seen more as an alternative to holding a subscription over the lifetime rather than the intent to forego any future features or enhancements out of interest of the exact current feature set being all you'll ever want. There is also the "in-between model" e.g. IntelliJ where you get the current version + a period of updates and you can either stay with where it ends at that period or pay a smaller amount for more updates.
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 do something which is "common" in Apple-land (Dash for MacOS does this, a Twitter client did this as well, over and over): They get the same app, add some features, call it v2, launch as a new app and remove v1 from the store.
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.
"Entitled" seems like an inappropriate word here. OP isn't entitled to the software, and the publisher isn't entitled to repeat customers or the perception of being a good value.
I dunno. I understand "entitle" has connotations - like the word "privilege" these days - but I thought this was used in the straight sense of the word.
It sounds like you bought Halide 1. At the time, we had supported Halide 1 for three years of huge feature updates when we launched Halide Mark II. Rather than just drop Halide 1, we gave everyone Mark II and a year of additional updates.
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.
Following the action button release, we added deferred processing support. It involved rewriting a bit of the capture pipeline, but significantly speeds up 48MP captures.
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.
Without any malice or snide intent, I assume you must be under 25? Quickest example that comes to mind is every OS update to both Apple and Microsoft platforms until the former went free. Hell, iPhone OS 2 was a paid upgrade for iPod touch users.
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).
30+ years in the software industry. Everyone did this back in the day - then it changed for 3 reasons (1) completely unsustainable (2) people didn't upgrade, or being forced to upgrade and pay large prices got grumpy about it. (3) the money people figured out subscriptions were more profitable.
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...
We think we have a fix ready. If you'd like to help verify, please email support@lux.camera and mention Hacker News, and we'll get you on a TestFlight.
I'm interested in the benefits of this app for anyone who doesn't have an iPhone 15 Pro that takes video in Apple Log. The post made it seem it seem to me like an iPhone 15 Pro was required.
The ability to record in log is very important. Without log, you're never going to get the results as advertised on the box. You can attempt to grade any footage from any camera with any color grade software, but with a huge amount of limitations. When recording in a format that is not "log", you will have already trashed the majority of data an app like this needs to make those subtle adjustments. In log, the highlights tend to be preserved better as well as details in shadows have not be crushed into oblivion. If your non-log footage is brought in, the same knobs/buttons will be available, but the data it is needing has been lost and it just will not have the same effect. You will not be satisfied with "its abilities" as you are now in the "you're doing it wrong" with your workflow
Kind of a tangent but I'm worried that "Kodiak" is not going to pass the "a moron in a hurry" test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_moron_in_a_hurry) and could get them in trouble. I for one read it as "Kodak" the first few times. Hopefully they cleared it with the owner of the trademark.
The design of the Kodiak card (logo? icon? not sure if there's a better word) also seems like it's intentionally mildly reminiscent of the Kodak logo, without being close enough that it's obvious at first glance.
I don't see a way to grade the footage from within the BMD app. Their app seems more designed to take advantage of the ProRes/log captures intended to be used in Resolve Studio. This app allows you to do the grading on your device. So that's a pretty obvious difference. If you're someone using Resolve, you'll probably be enticed by the BMD app as it fits your existing workflow. If you're someone looking to stay on device or just don't have a computer, this gets you to a similar ability right there
Applying a LUT is not the same thing as color grading. It's simply applying a LUT. The app that was specifically linked to is not Resolve. It is an app tapping into the new features introduced with the newest model device. If you use the linked app to acquire footage with your phone, you would still need to make that data available to the iPad version of Resolve. Again, this app does not require that at all.
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.
Might I ask why this is all you thought a grading session involved? Clearly, this is a touchy subject for me as I spent a few years as an assistant to a very talented colorist. The plethora of YouTube videos saying color correct using my amazing LUTs available when you join my Patreon blah blah nonsense is really sad.
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.
Not understanding might not be far from the fact, but it is probably just posturing. I doubt most of the Tubers understand it themselves which is the real reason they can't share. They saw it on some other YT video, and then made it like it was their own idea.
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.
Tracking eyes and reducing shadows within a mask is ... Beyond what I would call grading. It all feels like some serious gatekeeping. Thanks for your reply heh but there sure is a lot of FUD out there in the mastering and grading world.
Beyond color grading? Gate keeping? (whatever in the world you mean by that).
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.
Lol back to "it's not just luts lamer" heh ... In the computer world in my experience people who just like to say people are wrong never go anywhere, but it sure does feel a requirement of the entertainment industry.
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.
Wow, that's just so far off basis, it's flabbergasting.
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 know it's not just lookup tables. I'm waiting for you to talk about something other than that lol
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.
What more could you possibly need me to explain? I've provided much more detail than a lot of the YT tutorials of saying download my LUT. I've described recognizing that as the signal was pushed to the max the color changed from white to magenta and the actual cause coming from a bad sensor in a camera not delivering enough data in the green channel which required using the grading software to isolate and push the green channel harder so that it went back to the desired white. I've briefly talked about the basics of primary and secondary grading. I've talked about using the scopes to see how the adjustments you are making are actually affecting the signal. I have provided much detail on how a grading session is not just applying a LUT. I have never in a serious conversation said that's proprietary knowledge and you're not worthy. I have openly shared. You have not actually asked any direct question other that taking offense and my offense.
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.
I really reread this all earnestly, and I guess all I see is tactics and no strategy discussion. I understand that to ... Change the color of an image you have to adjust that color, or that if there is a cast or shadow of an unwanted color that ... One thing a video tool does is adjust color.
But why or what next? Who knows. You gave it to a colorist.
I've tried to repeatedly point out you keep shitting on LUTs as if that isn't what anyone can say as a secret word to bitch about to get into the secret pro chat room. I get it. But if you don't know of any theory materials or why any of this all is done then I don't know why you continue to comment. Photoshop is a very old tool, but I don't know why doing basic image adjustments should impress me, unless that's your point here, that it all might as well just be applying a simple curve and calling it day but you seem to also be upset with people that reduce the work to that so it is indeed very confusing. If you don't know how to teach a craft you claim to know then do you really know it?
You seem to misunderstand the role of LUTs in color grading. LUTs (Look-Up Tables — a simple multi-dimensional array data structure) describe how one color is transformed into another, and they are used for efficient color transformations. In Resolve, the tools you described help build a LUT in memory, which is then applied to each pixel in each frame, often using SIMD instructions for efficiency. This avoids the need to procedurally apply each setting to each pixel individually, which is way slow.
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.
My contention isn't how a LUT works in the background technically, but the fact that people consider applying a LUT all of what a colorist does. If you want to simplify it to that level, then it's really not even a conversation worth having as that's not the answer to the question.
The Kino introductory blog post makes quite clear that all they do is apply one of a set of LUTs that ship with their app. Personally I'd be interested in one that tried to apply colouring more "intelligently", e.g. detecting faces etc and applying appropriate settings.
The app is obviously targeting a different audience, but having bought it and recorded some test footage on it now, it has considerably fewer features than Blackmagic Cam for videography/cinematography pros - no zebras, focus peaking, stabilisation settings, anamorphic de-squeeze, etc - even commonly-expected framerates like 23.98fps / 29.97fps and settable aspect-ratios like 2.39:1 aren't available as far as I can see.
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.
I for one would love to see us drop the fractional frame rates (29.97, etc). They're an archaic technical relic that cause trouble when working with timecode. At Sphere we debated standardizing on 30/60/120fps but ultimately decided it was a battle we didn't want to fight in an already complicated building.
FWIW, I truly hope 24fps never goes away entirely. Something about it is the key to making movie stars look like legends and regular people look like a stars, imo.
Yeah, agree on 24fps, and I don't think poster above you meant to remove 24, just those annoying NTSC/PAL rates that are close to integers, but aren't and are stupid as hell in an all-digital 2024.
Yeah, what qingcharles says. I personally can't say I've seen what's special about 24fps artistically, but it doesn't bother me from a technical perspective (as much).
As someone who lives more on the artistic side than the technical, but appreciates both, that’s honestly reassuring to hear.
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 too have a similar subjective sense from being in and around film and video production over the last couple decades about that "cinematic something" look we associate with film. However, I'm not sure we're being accurate in thinking it's entirely the frame rate. Certainly that's part of it but I think it's entirely possible we'd view 30fps as every bit as good - if all other things were equal.
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.
As a former happy Halide user, I bought their previous new app Spectre on launch, but sadly haven't found a good chance to use it.
(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.
Their other apps are much older than 2 years and still have a buy-once model. This company has a good track record. (There is a subscription for some long-running services if I'm not mistaken.)
FiLMiC Pro, another pro camera app for iPhone, also existed for years [0] and sold with the one-time-purchase business model. They're now a subscription [1] and owned by Bending Spoons / Evernote. (Plus, more bad news [2]...)
What happens is you run out of new people to sell your niche app to (or hit a long rather thin tail) while continuing to provide updates for your existing userbase. So you either have to release arbitrary new versions from time to time leaving the old ones neglected and eventually unsupported (or with the overhead of supporting several versions) or you switch to a subscription 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.
Subscription fatigue is very real today, but to your point, as a business you can't provide eternal updates (work) for free.
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
I mean that initially the 15% commission was only for subscription sales. Then more recently, Apple added the small business program which gave 15% commission for any sales (not only subscriptions), at least for smaller companies
> 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.
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?).
Personally, even if I don't personally purchase this, I hope your wrong because I am strongly against subscriptions in most cases.
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.
The real problem is that people are afraid of paying high one time prices. Subscriptions allow you to lower your prices, which lowers the barrier of entry.
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.
I don't understand what people have against subscriptions.
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.
What do, say, furniture stores do when they "run out of users"?
> 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.
Sofas don't need constant bug fixes; they don't inexplicably stop working when someone upgrades their apartment with a new TV. Also, the up-front cost of a piece of furniture is a couple of orders magnitude higher than most apps, which help keeps the retailer in the black until it's time for the customer to buy another, similarly high priced item.
I just looked at two pomodoro apps on the app store, one had a one-time purchase fee, the other had a subscription only model. It's a freaking pomodoro app! I can't believe I have to pay for that in the first place (why doesn't the countdown app of Apple not have a widget =.=) but a subscription? People are greedy af.
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.
These smaller developers go through the trouble of building an app and getting verified for distribution on the App Store but don't give even a moment's thought to pricing? Surely the easiest option is free compared to some arbitrary monthly price and having to set up payments, etc.
Software isn't a "thing" so there is nothing to sell. The only way to monetize software is to monetize the labor of writing it directly. When you "sell" "licenses" to software, you're just double, triple, N dipping on monetizing labor that already happened.
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.
I never said "they should do apps for free". I was rebutting the idea that small app developers don't give any thought to pricing and just use a monthly subscription, which sounds like more work than just giving it away for free. If they landed on a subscription model they must have given it _some_ thought.
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.
You could almost use this argument to convince me for a complex software like the Adobe products that is constantly getting new, major updates, but for a Pomodoro app? Honestly, $1 seems reasonable.
I should have been clearer. Apps from big publishers were more expensive than the indies in the 1980s. And indie shops that were charging ~$40 ($100 in 2024 dollars) for their titles. This is a direct comparison to the type of pomodoro app mentioned in the upthread comment.
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.
> 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?
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...
Apple Watch app, widgets, Live Activities, new phone sizes... there are always things Apple wants you to add over time. Do you want meaningful updates or abandoned software? It doesn't take a full time job, but it's significantly more than $1 per install
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?
> Apps from big publishers were more expensive than the indies in the 1980s. And indie shops that were charging ~$40 ($100 in 2024 dollars) for their titles.
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.
> software from indie publishers used to cost in the ballpark of $40 in the late 1980s
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.
This is happening with a lot of companies that don't really have to care about "startup value"; they're tiny (sometimes even one-person) shops that aren't likely to ever go public, be bought for millions, or so on. I think you've got the cause and effect reversed for a lot of these -- the App Store pricing model has driven the price people expect to pay for apps down substantially, which made the "buy outright and then buy a new version in a couple years, at a discount, if it appeals to you" model much harder to sustain. I don't love subscriptions for apps that don't have a server-side component, but I get it.
(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.
Apps at the scale of what GP describes were often freeware with no ads or tracking back in the day. I remember when PC Magazine would send a CD-ROM full of utilities like that with the latest issue (not strictly free but I was already subscribing). Or when I would search download.com for the specific tool I needed. I even made a free tool for timing debate tournaments in high school, which was similarly complex to the timer you need to subscribe to in the app store.
That doesn't seem odd to me. Pomodoro/focus apps are a category where people start casual, but end up developing very specific desires that narrow their options. Someone catering to that can charge a bit.
Whether it's ethical for developers to cater to that kind of helpless behavior is another question.
People are so used to the zero interest rate period of tech that everyone expects the pricing model of VC backed startups that can burn money forever and maybe figure out a business model at some point.
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.
I’m not sure what your point was. Is this in defense or against IaP?
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.
I totally agree with you. I don't mind paying for creative devs to build awesome software. I do mind cash grabs. Mobile gaming is the most frustrating category. It's sad that pay-once-no-ads games like Crashlands and 80 Days are the exception. Enterprise software is a close second, but I'm not paying those bills out of my own pocket.
I know right! I run a freemium B2C app and I get users telling me this all the time. It's so ridiculous. No one is forcing anyone to use the software. Go write your own version and give it away for free.
> Speaking of accidental taps, when gripping the side of your phone to keep things stable, we found it too easy to accidentally tap buttons.
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.
I will say I love this feature on my iPad (touch the screen and hold without moving, the video will be 2x until you let go) but I wish it could be turned on on a per-device basis.
This is great! Just yesterday I was looking for a way to get a daylight 5500k white balance on videos the same way I do in Halide but it seems there’s no way to do that in the built in camera app.
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!
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 419 ms ] threadWe'll have to see where it goes, from here.
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.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cinema#English
However, the advertisement in the blog post made by Sandwich Video was entirely shot on Kino.
I'm not saying anything that the sales numbers don't already say (app sales, subscriptions, click through rates, anything): Android users just don't buy as much stuff with their phones, it doesn't mean they're poor it just means they don't like to click pay through the hamster's wheel of mobile purchases as much as iOS users.
My point is if the average Android user were even half as likely to buy then the numbers would be about the same plausibly, they wouldn't be half the revenue. I suspect if you're a small shop focused on apps for the top end of phones you just don't have time for all this.
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.
Really tells how much they care about their craft
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SIxEiL8ujA
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.
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.
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.
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
(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.
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
https://qoomon.github.io/time-timer-webapp/
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
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.
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!
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eQPPa_8Z13o