Kyno Support
How can we help you today?
General Feedback
This is an old thread, but I have to agree with Dan that the player is slow with ProRes 422. Quicktime Player is MUCH faster. I really like the app, but I have to use it with QT Player and move back and forth because I simply can't effectively scrub 10 bit 4k ProRes 422 clips (from Atomos NinjaV) -and, the fast playback does not work at all. This workaround works, but is inefficient.
Adding a transcription feature would make this the go-to application for the industry, just wishing!
Thank you for your detailed feedback and sorry for the delay. Lots to go through here, so let me get straight to the points you make:
1) User Interface
I think learning keyboard shortcuts to be more efficient is key here. Kyno supports so many different workflows that we have to strike a balance between them. For example placing the prev/next buttons in the player would make it difficult to find them when you're just skipping through files. There is a shortcut for prev/next: Cmd-Left / Cmd-Right (or Cmd-Alt-Left / Cmd-Right-Left while you're in a text field). I do agree that the action and convert menus need a cleanup and we will surely work on other areas as well.
2) Player performance
Kyno is praised for it's playback performance and we consider it on par with players like Quicktime or VLC (with much broader format support!). When comparing it with an application like Prelude you have to consider an important difference: Kyno doesn't require you to do an ingest before you can look at the clip, we play the clip straight from the source, which is important for screening and quality checking. Prelude and others do require ingest (and make you create a project etc. first) and generate so-called proxies in the background to optimize playback.
The same thing applies to scrubbing over thumbnails to see the video content - it just has limits when playing from source, we do plan on looking into that and see what's possible though, which may already be helpful enough.
3) Usage of screen real estate
We're aware of that and we plan to allow viewing the list and detail at the same time, possibly in two separate windows to allow users to use their screen more efficiently. I can't give you a concrete date on that yet.
4) Fast skipping through video
Thanks for the screen recording, it's a bug we're aware of when going through a clip quickly. We're in the process of improving the player's ability to play clips at higher speeds, also to support JKL controls known from other video software. That should take care of that problem and should arrive in one of the next 1-2 releases.
5) Price
I can see your point, especially when you just started using Kyno. But it just packs so much functionality that we think the price is totally worth it, especially if you use it professionally, and we do have great additions in store for the future. Note that the update price is no subscription you'll always be able to use the version you have when your year runs out
Thanks again and let me know if there's anything else I can do!
Dan Mu
I'm THE client avatar that you had in mind when you designed this software -- a photographer who is moving into video world and is desperate for a multimedia manager because Lightroom simply doesn't work well for video and certainly not for audio. I was thrilled when someone told me about Kyno and I raced to install it a day or so ago.
I've been using the heck out of it, easily putting several hours into moving around and reorganizing several years of video clips ranging from 3d animations to interviews to stock nature scenes. It's been insanely helpful already and is definitely hitting a niche. With that said, I love Kyno already....
but....
The user interface is somewhat clunky, disorganized, and terribly inefficient. Fortunately, I love learning hotkeys and this is already helping, but so many operations are out of reach requiring one to move screens to move the mouse from one end of the screen to the other (such as "go to next/previous" arrows at the top of the screen rather than near the scrub bar). Further, the preview window is surprisingly slow considering how fast the software operates overall (I'm on a fast computer). Compared to Adobe Prelude, the Kyno scrub preview screen is operating at a snail's pace, even when the vid is on a fast SSD.
Like many people, i'm using 4k monitors to do all of my work. While I don't maximize the Kyno window, I do keep it occupying about 40% of the screen --- and there's a lot of wasted space in the interface...space that could be used for awesome stuff. For example, in the player Window, I'm desperate to have a mini-browser of other videos in my current directory (much like how Lighroom as a strip at the bottom so you can see several of the files before and after the current file). This would allow a more intuitive navigation between media files. Lastly it would be awesome to have scrolling within a thumbnail so you don't have to launch the video player every time just to see the content behind a thumb.
There also seems to be a weird bug with Shift Right arrow when advancing video. If you press Shift Right only two or three times, it works perfectly. However, If you press Shift and hold down Right (so you can quickly advance through minutes of video), it bounces ahead as expected then hiccups and jumps back to the beginning. This is quite weird. See my attached video.
Overall I love the concept of the program but I'm not sure it's yet worthy of the steep $159 price tag -- especially if there's also a $79 per year upgrade fee. While I'm usually obsessive about buying software and keeping it updated, the price and upgrades for the current features seems a bit on the excessive side -- but I'm sure other opinions differ. With some basic interface improvements, the pitch might be a bit more convincing.