Bredo / Guides / Instead of Kyno

What to use instead of Kyno on a Mac

Kyno did five jobs in one window: it let you look at footage where it sat, log it, convert it, back it up, and send the good parts to an editor. Nothing replaces all five in the same way, so the useful question is which of the five you actually lean on. Three of them now have better answers than they did when Kyno was new, one belongs in a dedicated encoder, and the fifth, knowing what is on a drive that is not plugged in, is something Kyno never did.

Kyno is still sold, by Signiant, and it received an update in September 2025 after several years without one. If it does what you need on the macOS you run, nothing here is a reason to stop. This page is for people who spent those quiet years wondering what they would move to.

Job one: looking at footage without importing it

The thing people miss first is opening a folder and simply watching what is in it, at speed, with no project and no import step. Finder does a thin version of this: select a clip and press Space, and Quick Look plays most camera formats, with the arrow keys moving through the folder. It falls down on anything long, on RAW formats without a system decoder, and on telling one C0043.MP4 from another.

What you want from a replacement is posters big enough to recognise, J K L shuttling, and the camera's own metadata beside the picture: date, lens, frame rate, codec, timecode. It should read the folder where it is. A tool that copies or moves your footage before it will show it to you has misunderstood the job, and an editor's project that points at those files will find out later.

Job two: logging, so the edit starts with selects

Kyno's markers, subclips, ratings and tags were the reason working editors kept it open. The discipline matters more than the tool: go through each shoot once, make one decision per clip, and mark the part worth using rather than describing the whole clip. Three levels are enough. Use, use first, and do not use.

Whatever you log in has to hand those decisions on in a form the editor understands: favourites and keywords in Final Cut, good takes and markers in Premiere, ranges that arrive as ranges. Logging that stays inside the logging app is a diary. Going through footage and picking selects covers the pass itself.

Job three: converting and rewrapping

This is the one to take out of the browser altogether. Dedicated encoders do it better and are kept current with new camera formats: Apple's Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder, and the free Shutter Encoder all transcode to ProRes or H.264 in batches, and rewrap without re-encoding where the codec allows it. If the reason you converted was to edit on a slower Mac, both Final Cut and Premiere now make their own proxies and relink to the originals for you, which removes most of the need.

Job four: a copy you can trust before the card is erased

Kyno could copy a card and verify it. So can several tools built for nothing else, and they are the standard to measure against: a hash made while the file is read, every destination read back and compared, a record of the hashes kept beside the footage in a format someone else can check, such as ASC MHL. Before you erase a card explains what that proves and what it does not.

Job five: sending selects to the editor

The part of Kyno that saved the most time was the last step: pick clips, send to Final Cut or Premiere, and arrive with names, markers and metadata intact. The modern equivalent is an XML the editor opens: FCPXML for Final Cut and Resolve, a Premiere XML, or OTIO. Check that it carries what you logged and not only the file paths, and that the paths survive the footage being moved to another Mac. Getting clips into Final Cut or Premiere goes through what should line up on the other side.

The job Kyno never did: drives that are not plugged in

Kyno was a browser, not a catalogue. It showed what was mounted, and forgot a drive the moment it was ejected. For anyone with more than a few drives that is the gap that hurts most, and it is the reason people ran a cataloguer such as NeoFinder beside it: one tool to know where footage was, another to look at it once the right drive had been found and plugged in.

If you are choosing again, choose something that keeps what it learned. Thumbnails, dates, cameras and your own marks for every clip on every drive it has seen, searchable while the drive is in a drawer, with the drive's name on each result so you know which one to fetch. Cataloguing external drives covers how to build that by hand if you would rather.

Moving without losing what you logged

Before you leave any logging tool, get your decisions out of it in a form that outlives it. Export what it offers, whether that is an XML per project, a spreadsheet of clips with their ratings, or sidecar files beside the footage. Keep the exports with the footage, not in the application's own folder.

Then apply the same test to whatever you move to. Ask what is left if it stops being developed. The footage should be in ordinary folders with the names the camera gave it, the hash lists should be files you can read, and your selects should already have been sent to the editor where the work happens. An app that passes that test is one you can leave, which is what makes it safe to start using.

Questions

Is Kyno still being developed?

It is still sold, by Signiant, and it received an update in September 2025 after several years without one. Whether that pace is enough is a judgement about your own work: check the release notes against the macOS version and the cameras you use before building a new job on it.

Is there one app that replaces all of Kyno?

Not all five jobs. Browsing, logging, backing up and sending to an editor can live in one app; converting footage to another codec is better left to a dedicated encoder such as Compressor, Media Encoder or Shutter Encoder, which do it better than any browser did.

Can I keep my folders exactly as they are?

Yes, and you should. Any replacement worth using reads footage where it already is. Be wary of a tool that wants to move or rename existing files before it will show them to you: a project in an editor points at those paths.