Kyno 1.8 comes with DaVinci Resolve and Avid Media Composer integration, Blackmagic RAW support, and adds performance and workflow improvements, with requested features and some surprises.

Kyno’s development has been the result of a continued dialog between the developers at Lesspain Software and the community of users.  In 2018, with Kyno 1.5, the company introduced two versions – Standard and Premium – with a series of new features requested by users of Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro. The Premium version is geared towards larger teams and organizations in the broadcast, news & film industry.

The next version of the app, Kyno 1.6, announced February 2019, introduced RED Raw support and Frame.io integration, along with many other features. Dialog with our community, said Lesspain Software then, “is what shapes Kyno and version 1.6 is no different in that regard as it delivers on some of the most important feature requests we received from content producers all over the world.”

An app constantly evolving

Kyno 1.7, from October 2019, represented another big leap in workflow productivity adding more options to manage crucial metadata in NLE workflows and for teamwork in a project as well as a host of improvements in playback of the most important formats and yet more media management and transcoding functionality.

Now, Lesspain Software introduced Kyno 1.8, a release that, says the company, “brings us a lot closer to fulfilling our original vision of being the central hub in production workflows across all major NLEs and production formats. Kyno 1.8 is packed with new features you have pushed us hard for as well as some surprises you will love. All this in the name of saving time and headaches during production and post, so you can concentrate on making great content.”

New key features in Kyno 1.8

Without further ado, here are some of the key features you’ll find in this version of a software that Lesspain Software presents as “The Smart All-In-One Media Management App”, a tool for videographers, but also, as we wrote before, able to export stills to multiple destinations, along with many other features photographers… and yes, videographers love.

• DaVinci Resolve integration – the best media manager meets the rising star among NLEs
  The new “send to” integration brings the power and ease of integrating field-logging and pre-selection workflows with your NLE of choice to the growing DaVinci Resolve editing community. Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro users have learned to appreciate this way of working for several years and with Kyno 1.8 Resolve users no longer have to miss out. Send your prepared clips with metadata (tags, ratings, descriptions, markers, subclips) to Resolve in a two-click operation. Kyno’s subclip metadata allows you to assemble rough cuts from your footage in no time.
• Blackmagic RAW – Cinema Camera users here it is!
  With the enormous success the excellent Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera has had in the filmmaking community we got a lot of requests to build support for BRAW into Kyno. You can now play back BRAW footage natively in Kyno, either in full or reduced resolution, if your computer isn’t fast enough, transcode or subclip footage to ProRes and other formats and use all logging and NLE integration tools with BRAW in Kyno’s Standard Edition. You’ll be able to offload, manage, preview and transcode your BRAW footage with unparalleled convenience.
• Avid Media Composer integration – delivering for our broadcast and feature film users
  Avid Media Composer is the industry’s battle horse and we’ve received so much demand for finally closing this gap that we’re proud to announce that with Kyno 1.8 Premium Edition, Avid Media Composer workflows are supported though ALE export as well as copy & paste for markers between Kyno and Media Composer.
• Workflow improvements for transcoding and metadata transfer
  The new incremental transcoding workflow lets you transcode entire directory structures without worrying what you already transcoded last time, great for proxy or dailies workflows. The new automatic audio mapping in our transcoder will take care of almost all combinations of input and output format, e.g. automatically split discrete multichannel audio to mono tracks if required or create broadcast wave multichannel output, or create stereo output for mp3 audio export thus giving you an even more robust, worry-free transcoding experience.Metadata of entire folder structures can be transferred between copies of the same footage in a simple copy & paste operation as demonstrated in our recent remote collaboration tutorial. This is great for editorial workflows or generally transferring logging metadata between dailies/proxies and master files.
• Major performance improvements for thumbnails and batch analysis
  Users of multi-core machines will see an enormous improvement in thumbnail generation performance with this release. The aggressiveness of this can now be configured in the preferences. For people doing batch analysis on large data-sets using Kyno’s preanalyze function, Kyno 1.8 is a game-changer. Preanalyze is now a background task and uses all the cores you have for a huge speed-up when doing this.

New getting started videos

The list of changes does not end with the features above, and Kyno 1.8 includes countless little improvements like more metadata columns, some new formats, automatic application of sidecar-LUTs, improved drag & drop, a new MD5 verification option, FCP XML workflow and Excel export improvements as well as fixes and performance improvements make this the best Kyno ever. For a full list of all new features, improvements and bug fixes, you should check the release notes published by Lesspain Software.

The company also took the time to create a number of new introductory videos to provide a much better onboarding experience. The videos cover what Kyno is used for, introduction to the most important features as well as a run-down of advanced features and more. Lesspain Software decided to go ahead and create them because “as we often run into situations where even long-time, happy Kyno users tell us ‘I didn’t know that Kyno could …’, we think it’s definitely worth a look, even for people already familiar with Kyno.”

Win a FREE Kyno Premium license

To celebrate the massive 1.8 update and the video relaunch Lesspain Software is giving away three Kyno Premium licenses! To enter the raffle, do one of the following until June 1st:

•  Subscribe to the company’s YouTube channel and leave a comment under the new Kyno intro video
• Follow Kyno on Twitter and post a reply to this tweet with a mention of at least two filmmaker friends who should know about Kyno
• Follow Kyno on Facebook and leave a comment under this video with a mention of at least two filmmaker friends who should know about Kyno

If you want a slight edge in our draw, do more than one or be extra-creative. Good luck!