Kino launches from closed beta: a Figma-style collaborative video editor built for AI agents and human teams

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Triple cl.

Then we have Luke from Kino. Building collaborative video editor. Luke, how you doing? Welcome to the show.

Doing amazing. Happy to be on.

Kino. Great name for a business.

Great name.

Powerful. Powerful name.

Imagine if it wasn't called that. It would be much worse.

Totally.

Introduce the product. Like at what level of abstraction do you see the modern video editor operating?

Yeah, we've all seen the videos including my launch video co-director Donald's where Opus 5.5 by itself can create unimaginably good motion graphics plus videos in general combining motion graphics, real life footage and everything that foul AI can give you.

Uh we are giving that a home. uh and all of the things that you need to do real work where all of your teammates footage and all of your teammates edit decisions are in one place. And to prove that this is something that is worthwhile, uh Donald, my colleague, and I, we spent the past few days living in one giant editor timeline, Figma style, while swarms of my agents and swarms of his agents all just chipped away at the same mega timeline. Uh a thing that we've been working on for a while.

Awesome. So um how do you see the how do you see the business positioning between building a harness and building like a SAS workspace where AI work gets done like these are blurring but there are definitely companies uh I'm thinking of like Slack with Slackbot is AI powered but it's still mostly a software product. Most people would not refer to Slackbot as a as a harness, but then you have like a like a cognition, a Devon, which is like a harness on top of the of the coding agents. Um, how are you seeing the positioning of your product?

We are a managed service through and through in a way that is very similar to cognition and Devon, but I think what makes us different is that we really want you to use your subscriptions

for OpenAI, for cloud code, for everything. because we think that if you use $10,000 of code tokens, which is not hard to go through, uh it would mean a lot if you were to spend those productive work in our platform.

Uh that means that what can we do to help? Uh agents make a lot of mistakes if they are left to their own devices in this weird and odd domain. Uh and nothing really has a URL. Uh we have have to be the ones to make a URL for every single timeline item and media item and we have to be the ones to manage this long tale of problems. uh you cannot drag and drop the video the uh video files that come off of your guys' cameras into Chrome.

Uh so we had to make it so that you can we had to build all that those custom decoders.

Yeah.

Uh you know everything from Blackmagic to RED to

uh a few more a few more fun ones. But uh there's a long tale of tasks that go into video editing from colorization to really in intense performance engineering that we're here to do for you. That's why we consider ourselves manager. Yeah, video is an interesting domain because it's it's like not you can't just oneshot it,

right? Because you could hire the most talented like video team in the world like

and you can tell them here's my objective. Here's my influences. This is what I want it to look like. This is what I want it to do. And no matter how good they are, you're going to have a bunch of feedback and things that you want to change. And I feel like that's quite different than some of these other domains where you can oneshot like likeal you can you can there's a lot of different things in software that you can effectively oneshot basically say like

this is the feature this is what it needs to do this is how it should interact with the rest of the software

and then it just does it and it's like okay it functions whereas like

video is so is a it it can there's always you're always going to want to change things or at least for a lot of different Yeah.

formats and outputs.

Talk a little bit about

Yeah.

cinema.

Talk a little bit about uh like how close is Chrome to actual like native app performance because a lot of just rendering out a timeline can be vastly different if you're GPU accelerated versus doing on the CPU. like there's a lot of when you're when you're deep in the Premiere or Blackmagic uh rabbit hole uh you actually wind up starting to think about the specs of your computer uh a little bit more than I think most creatives would like to. But Chrome feels like there's been a lot of progress there with WebGL and Assembly, but is it 90% of the way there? Is it 100% like where where are we? Well, there's this new just like how web assembly allowed new businesses like Figma and many others. Uh webc is what I is it's what allowing this formulation of our business. Okay. Uh it is like f ofmpeg in the browser fully GPU accelerated if you want.

Uh which means that it's here like we we could not have done this business in 2024.

Interesting. Uh this has all been here pretty recently and we're building on top of that to do the really crazy stuff where

you know vintage camcorders that people in Bushwick love to use that works in keynote now because we built those decoders on top of this new technology that every browser has now.

Wait, but what what's different about a vintage C is doesn't just give you an MP4 at the end of the day.

It's a lot of stuff is from the premp era and of course even kind of fancy podcast sets they're not exporting H.264. they're,

you know, you have to do the ProRes and everything, but I think the the much more profound thing is that performance. If people scrub back and forth and it feels crappy, they're just not going to use us.

Uh, and that's what we've been grinding along, grinding on, uh, and just pulling people in. We talked to Tyler last year when we were much earlier in our journey.

Uh, his very early feedback was so useful and

that's awesome.

Grinding towards where we

Yeah, that's amazing. Um, how are you thinking about integrating uh, AI video generation, more generative AI tooling? It feels like we're oddly still in the slop era. There's some projects that I'm seeing coming on the pipe where it's like, okay, this might be the time when we all sit down and collectively watch an AI generated film and think it's good. Uh, but we're still not there yet. Like, uh, Harry Potter Balenciaga was like three or four years ago. And then, uh, there's there's an AI movie, The Gods Must Be Challenged or something. I forget what the name is, but um there's there's an AI movie that's coming that people are optimistic about, but we're not quite there. But it feels like a hybrid solution is fully embraced where it's green screen replacement, background, set extension, that type of stuff. How are you thinking about integrating those tools uh seamlessly?

Like like so much knowledge work, I think LLMs are are going to be just so important here. Seeing how Astra is such a good collaborator in things like Blender

is exactly what I experienced alongside the people I made this video with where we just did crazy amounts of visual effects that I never knew how to do before this. Right. Uh and uh if I could choose between some magical lab who could give me a model, a diffusion model that could make a Pixar like movie or a I would say coding agent that could use Render Man and Blender and video editors to make a Pixar-l like movie, I would choose the LM every single time. Mhm.

Uh there's a level of controllability that I think all real artists clearly want. I think the method the model of AI movies as you type into a text prompt and then you get a beautiful movie at the end. Um just kind of feels like the apocalypse for a lot of people and for good reason. Uh and there's a there's a kind of positive vision that we're really excited to demonstrate here where it's like no everything is code. Everything is uh but at the same time everything is what you remember. The this part we're seeing right here. Uh we just had Kino reskin all of Kino itself. Sure.

Uh, we downloaded the ISO of Mac OS Lever and then reskinned Kino to look like that instead.

And then my friend interrupts me and asks me if I'm going to stop goofing around and ship the video and

yeah,

all that.

So, how much of that was made in Kino?

All that was all.

Okay.

Kino. And are you starting with raw footage, a cut down, a rough cut, and then using AI tooling and Kino more for that final level of edit and polish, or are you starting with a prompt and saying, "Hey, like I just plugged in my my uh, you know, Sony FX3, like go grab the files and start start assembling. You do the rough cut." Where do you lean into uh AI versus uh where do you want to dip in, dip out, etc.?

Well, I've I consider my friend Donald has got me to do this. I don't even prompt anymore. I just feed my granola link to Keynote.

And the granola link contains me and Donald brainstorming about what the video should be.

Sure.

Uh and so Donald says, I'm going to let's do a scene where I throw the hard drive off the rooftop in our office. Uh that granola which had enough context of us talking to each other about what the scene should become is what was used by Kino to then lay out the rough cut alongside a storyboard that we also made in Kino.

And then did you wind up generating the video of you throwing the hard drive off off the roof or did you wind up doing

Yeah, that was a nightmare. We a brand new seed dance model came out this weekend and we begged everyone we knew to get access and the video only came together because they gave us access to this like new checkpoint. So, how much of

should have just thrown a real hard drive off off of the right? It'd be a little bit dangerous.

True. Yeah, catching is tricky. Yeah. So, how much of that is is AI generated versus AI produced motion graphics that are deterministically rendered versus shot with a camera captured in real life?

Well, that what you just saw is all of them. So, it starts that base plate that's motion graphics. That's real footage. That's Cance doing it thing. C dance. Yep.

And then when you see my laptop screen, if you go a little bit further when I catch the Whimo, that's not real. I rotoscoped my laptop screen to be something completely different.

But it is, but there is a there is a an actual footage plate of you in you with your hands on the computer.

Yes. Yelling at us and all that.

I like the game of figuring out what's real and what's not.

Uh before you before you bounce, how's how's growth been?

It's been good. We have been completely in closed beta until uh this morning and so we're really excited. Uh

for some reason I thought for some reason again I I thought you were going to launch I thought you launched yesterday but that but that's right. Uh it was this morning. So I'm sure it's going to be tremendous and uh I'm sure uh someone will try to buy this company by you know the end of the week as well because you guys are clearly like insanely tapped in and and headed uh skating to where the puck is going. So, uh, great to meet you and, uh, fantastic. Yeah, we're excited to, uh, to to play around with it more here at the Ultradome.

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