Some great features but some annoyances, too.

• Posted by worldharmony May 24, 2012
• Recommended for Social Butterflies or Tech/Social Networking Junkies

VIDEO CHOOSING

You can choose from your camera roll or take a fresh video- love it!

VIDEO CREATION
You then choose the "base image," meaning the video frame you want to use as the still image. Next you draw your mask, then hit Preview. Video processing seems to have sped up recently. I found this app to be interminably slow in the past but now its on a par with the others. Adding filters is also faster, and the filters offered here are more diverse and interesting. "Add Noise" seems to be popular.

EDITING YOUR IMAGE
OK, here's where I believe Kinotopic loses somewhat. I don't like having to go into a menu to choose the erase, zoom, undo, and redo tools. It's annoying and disrupts the creative process. But the erase tool combined with the zoom tool is GREAT and has helped me to fine-tune some nice imagery.

You can mask in 2x animation speed or regular speed, but the most interesting thing is that you can use them both in the same image, creating some strange effects. You can also mask in reverse regular speed and reverse 2x. I'd like to see how people combine these in a single image- you know someone has!

The animation here is also better than Cinemagram's, I believe. I don't see the weird warping of still areas.

SAVING & UPLOADING YOUR IMAGE
Below the colorization filters are the fields for titling and captioning your image. You MUST title your image or you cannot save it. People are quite creative here and I find this to be a fun feature when viewing images from around the world. Below the fields are options for reverse and video stabilization. You have to change these per-image. Below is a Private toggle. If it is set to Private, you cannot share your image in the stream. Finally you have the Create Kino button. Uploading is a bit slow but better than it used to be.

VIEWING IMAGES
Now your image is in the stream. You can share it to social networks here if you like. You can then elect to view your kinos via your profile, or view the stream. I have found Kinotopic to be annoyingly slow to the point of showing only a spinning circle rather than images. They seem to have improved this recently, which removes my biggest complaint about Kinotopic!

SOCIAL NETWORKING
You can comment and vote on images. You can view the hottest images, the latest ones, or just those of the people you are following. It's fun to go back and look at my images to see if they got any votes.

I cannot fathom the criteria for voting for an image. An image I think looks awesome gets NO votes, while one I think is pretty banal - like ambulance lights blinking- will get 12 votes.
This may be true of all of the apps but in Kino I see a lot of the same image ideas over and over. The wall-eyed wonders, moving shadows, smoke being sucked back into a mouth, the moving train, the hair blowing in the wind, the pouring liquid, the moving mirror image... I guess those are for we beginners! The more imaginative images can boggle your mind for a moment. I may be wrong to say that Kino has more "beginners" than the other two apps but that's the impression I get.