Kino vs. Dropbox

Dropbox is where the footage lives. Kino is where the video gets made. Here is what each one does at every stage, and how they fit together.

What Dropbox is for

Dropbox does one job very well: the same files on every machine, shared with a link, and frame comments in Replay. That is storage and review, and most companies need exactly that. What it does not touch is the middle: finding the moment, cutting it, and getting the cut back out. That part happens in another tool, on another copy of the footage.

What Kino adds

Kino covers the whole loop against one copy of the media: storage, editing, and delivery in one window.

Search by what was said and shown

Every clip is transcribed, every face recognized, every shot described at ingest. Ask for “the part where she explains the budget” and get timecoded results across the library.

Editing from any machine

Cuts, multicam, captions, graphics, and grading run in Kino. It streams proxies to everyone on the project and plays the original files on the machine that has them.

An agent on the timeline

Say what the cut needs in plain words. Kino makes it as a project with clips on the timeline; refine by hand or by asking again.

Delivery from the project

Export, share a review link, and publish from the project, so the finished file and its notes stay attached to the edit that made them.

Using both

Import footage from the shared Dropbox folder and Kino indexes it. Edits, transcripts, and notes live in Kino; put the finished export back in Dropbox for everyone else.

Side by side

	Dropbox	Kino
Sync the same files to every machine	Yes	Streams to every machine
Share a file with a link	Yes	Yes
Frame comments on a video	Yes, in Replay	Yes, on the cut and on assets
Search by what was said	—	Yes, timecoded
Search by who is on screen, or what is shown	—	Yes
Cut, multicam, captions, graphics, grade	—	Yes
Ask an agent to make the edit	—	Yes
Export and publish from the project	—	Yes

Who should switch, and who shouldn’t

If your team’s output is documents, Dropbox is enough. If your team’s output is video, the edit is where the hours go, and that is the part storage was never built to do. Keep Dropbox for what it is good at and try one project.