Kino launches code-first video editor for AI agents and teams

Kino has introduced a code-first video editor designed to let human collaborators and AI agents work on the same projects, combining footage storage, editing and review tools. In a Hacker News launch post, Luke from Kino said the application gives teammates and tools such as Codex and Claude Code a shared timeline and access to production assets.

The product is built on Remotion, with edits, motion graphics, timeline movements, comments and 3D scenes expressed as code, according to the post. That approach is intended to let agents change a project while people continue working through a visual editor, rather than requiring every small adjustment to be described in a prompt.

Kino’s central proposition is that media, instructions and project state should live together. Projects, clips, footage, comments and even individual frames have their own URLs, Luke wrote, allowing users to point an agent to a specific timeline item or a teammate’s requested correction instead of reconstructing the context elsewhere.

The company says collaboration happens in real time, with users able to see teammates’ cursors and their positions on the timeline. For Kino’s launch video, Luke described running more than five agents concurrently while another collaborator operated additional agents elsewhere in the project, including work on rotoscoping and color grading.

Kino also processes footage through transcription, embedding, description and face detection, according to the announcement. Users can scrub through footage locally while a low-resolution proxy is uploaded for teammates and cloud inference, an arrangement intended to combine local media access with shared production work.

For professional footage, Kino says it has built custom decoders supporting formats including ProRes, BRAW and R3D. Luke cited the ability to bring a 250GB ProRes clip directly into a timeline, crediting WebCodecs and libraries such as Mediabunny for enabling the application’s performance. The launch post did not provide independent benchmarks.

The editor marks a change from Kino’s earlier business. After its first launch in 2023, the company supplied bespoke, on-premises deployments for productions including Survivor and A24’s Beef, Luke said. Working around Avid Media Composer and studio security requirements limited its ability to use frontier models, prompting a rebuild as a standalone editor in 2025.

The shift targets a coordination problem as much as an editing task: keeping footage, creative decisions and feedback accessible to everyone doing the work. Luke said some teams now manage company media in Kino and use agents to produce videos, while filmmakers run multiple agents against the same project. Those usage accounts come from the company rather than independently verified customer reporting.

The full editor is free, with unlimited imports and exports, real-time collaboration and MCP access for users’ own agents, according to the announcement. Pro costs $25 per editor per month and lists unlimited MCP tool calls, share links, additional storage, YouTube search and team editing among its features. The post does not fully explain how collaboration entitlements differ between the plans.

Kino is available as an Electron desktop application; a browser-only version has not been released. The company is seeking feedback from individual creators, professional-media users and teams bringing in legacy editing projects, leaving broader workflow compatibility and performance as areas for users to assess.