Lux, the startup and makers of the popular pro photography app Halide and others, is venturing into video. The team today announced its plans to debut a new app, Kino, arriving in roughly two months’ time, that will allow iPhone users to work with video in a more professional capacity.
The news follows advances in iPhone video capture that have allowed Apple to film its own press events using an iPhone 15 Pro Max alongside other professional equipment. Recording artist Olivia Rodrigo also released a music video for her track “Get Him Back!” using an iPhone 15 Pro.
The Lux team additionally confirms that last fall’s launch of Log video support, which Lux co-founder Ben Sandofsky says is to “videomakers as RAW is to photographers,” inspired the team to build the new app for video.
“Since we launched Halide in 2017, one of our top questions from users has been ‘When are you going to add video capture?’” says Sandofsky in an announcement video. The company’s well-received Halide app had originally capitalized on the iPhone’s support for RAW photography to win an Apple Design Award and gain it many fans, who have now been clamoring for video support in Halide.
“I’m really excited to today announce: never. Halide is never going to be able to capture video,” Sandofsky teases.
Instead, the company is developing a new app for this purpose called Kino. The reason to build this as a separate app, beyond being able to monetize the feature as an additional product, has to do with the use cases for the two products. Halide is focused on the pro photography market while Kino will focus on pro videography, so presumably will have a host of additional features that could lead to clutter if included in the Halide app.
Sandofsky says the team has a deadline of February to ship it, as he will soon be a father. So, he explains, “We thought it would be fun this time to take you along this insane journey.”
That means, instead of building in secret followed by a splashy launch, the team at Lux will take users behind the scenes of app building as they weigh things like engineering problems and design considerations that go into developing Kino.
Much more isn’t yet known about what Kino will include or when, exactly, it will arrive, but it’s likely to be another well-built app, considering the startup’s track record for iPhone photography.
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