A Look at Media Management with Kyno
We’ve recently hit a milestone of over 10 thousand subscribers. On the way to that number, we’ve produced over a hundred videos for the channel. Keeping all that prior work organized isn’t easy, and we found ourselves looking for a system that would help keep track of our digital assets.
We first looked at Adobe Bridge, but it’s not the greatest media asset manager so we quickly abandoned that idea. Adobe Prelude is mostly for media ingesting and logging.
Then we found Kyno. BOOM!
Kyno, from Lesspain Software (haha, I get it), is a full featured media management program with some extra goodies for editors and content creators. They are not a sponsor of the channel and we purchased our own copy. But we think it’s worth every penny, and here’s why:
Flat View Hierarchy
One of the coolest features in Kyno is called “Drill down” and its flat view hierarchy. We have over 120 shows in 120 different folders on a huge hard drive. Kyno lets us view all our b-roll, rushes, stock footage, images, graphics, etc. as thumbnails that are quickly generated. Flat file hierarchy means we can look at one page of all the thumbnails of our videos, images and even audio files. This way we don’t have to constantly click into folders to see what’s inside. This is a huge time saver.
Media Tagging and Search
This is the primary reason we were looking for a media management solution. We’ve taken tons of stills and videos of lights, cameras, and gear that we can re-use in future videos. But only if we can find them. Also, some of our actors like Courtney, might need footage that we shot for their reel or we may want to re-use that video.
Kyno has some great “automatic” searchable metadata like video formats, resolution, FPS, etc. But we’re able to use the tagging system to tag our assets so whenever Frank needs to find that perfect shot of the Canon C100, he can do this quickly.
We can tag our files with multiple words for identification later. Kyno will then search on those tags. In fact, Kyno will search on filenames, descriptions, meta data…there are lots of searching and filtering options.
Built in Media Viewer
Kyno has a very powerful built in media viewer. It allows us to get a detailed view of a particular asset for tagging, rating and other information. One thing I really like is the Content tab. Clicking it will show you a thumbnail view of an entire video file. This allows us to see the overall contents of a video without having to scrub through. A real time saver.
Media Transcoding and subclips
A wonderful feature that I am using a bunch is Kyno’s ability to transcode video to different formats and create and use subclips.
You can set in-and-out points on clips in the media viewer and export them to Premiere or Final Cut Pro. Most exports can be done without re-transcoding the file, which makes the export amazingly fast. Tons of video formats are supported too, including HEVC, MXF, P2 and many more.
Integration with Premiere Pro
One feature that I have yet to really exploit is Kyno’s ability to send media assets directly to Premiere Pro or Final Cut. Within a few clicks, I can send my found video directly into my editor, maintaining all the metadata that I prepared in Kyno.
Price
As of this article, Kyno is $159 to purchase. This price includes 1 year of software updates. And, no, it’s not a subscription. You pay once and that’s it. If you want updates beyond the one year mark, you can purchase another year for $79. Otherwise, you have no other costs. This also allows you to activate it on two computers. So for now, one for me and one for Frank. Perfect.
If you’re in the market for an amazing media asset management program, give Kyno a try. You can try it for free for 30 days. And like I said before, Lesspain is not a sponsor and we bought our package. And we’re not looking back.
Kyno from Lesspain Software
https://lesspain.software/kyno/