Kyno and democratised filmmaking

The brief

The developers behind the Kyno media management app wanted to comment on the changes in the filmmaking and post industry over the last decade.

As a team with years of hands-on experience as editors, filmmakers, and now as app developers, they had a lot to say about the subject. They called on us to help craft a compelling journalistic article about the rapid changes in data and the lack of new tech to make it truly manageable.

We interviewed the team, then developed and pitched this story to the popular ProductionHub website.

The story

The last decade’s “democratization of filmmaking” is a truly wonderful thing. It has enabled more people to create via a lower barrier of entry, resulting in multimedia experiences that would never have seen the light of day several years earlier.

How did it happen? The introduction of file-based workflows together with drastic quality improvements in digital video has revolutionized video production; affordable cameras, equipment, and software mean affordable filmmaking, and the explosion of online video has lead to a huge increase in the video production worldwide.

NLEs and other post production software can run adequately on an entry level PC or Mac and can produce video in TV or even cinema quality. Cloud platforms have become commodities and platforms like Frankie, Frame.io and Wipster make web-based collaboration a reality no matter your level of experience.

And yet, despite these exciting innovations, the realities of media management in the production process have not changed much at all.

Part of the problem is the sheer amount of content we produce. With the advent of mainstream 4k and even affordable cameras capturing footage at more than 1,000 megabits per second, the mass of content captured today is beyond anything capable in previous years. Just think of the brand-new Panasonic GH5 moving up it’s in-camera bitrate to 400MBit from the GH4’s 100 or the DJI Inspire 2 capable of recording incredible 4200MBit 5.2 K RAW.

Furthermore, with the availability of cheap cameras that enable more perspectives of a shot – GoPro, drones and so on – comes an increase in output.

With that amount of pure data, media management and organization remains a huge challenge—and one that, even in 2017, hasn’t been solved. It somewhat sours the democratization of filmmaking that has us all so excited.