Simon Ubsdell — making trailers with the aid of Kyno
For more than two decades Simon Ubsdell has been one of the premier editors behind trailers and promos for both films and TV. It’s Kyno that helps Ubsdell turn his huge libraries of footage into punchy clips that linger in the memory.
Having overseen hundreds of trailer campaigns across a 25-year career, Simon Ubsdell’s reputation is unmistakable. Previously the co-founder and creative director of The Picture Production Co — which stood as the top trailer house outside the U.S. under his oversight — Ubsdell now runs the London-based Tokyo Productions Ltd.
Alongside his editing career, Ubsdell also works as a compositor, VFX and motion graphics artists, and — not content to stop there — as a developer of video post-production software plug-ins such as Hawaiki Keyer.
Ubsdell’s main focus at Tokyo Productions remains on snappy edits for trailers and TV spots. That means he’s tasked with condensing and synthesizing huge amounts of content into brief, eye-catching shorts. That’s precisely where Kyno comes into play, making it easy for Ubsdell to plug in digital assets from various sources without losing a step.
Diverse content, simplified solutions
“A lot of my work involves the need to grab video, stills, and audio assets quickly from a variety of libraries and other projects,” explains Ubsdell. “Increasingly, assets need to be accessible from a lot of different places at the same time, and this is where a solution like Kyno stands as essential.
“There are other asset management options out there, but I haven’t yet found one with the flexibility of Kyno,” he continues. “Kyno fits my needs perfectly in terms of speed and ease of use — the overall design means it’s very simple to get to grips with, but there’s also a huge amount of depth to the application.”
Kyno has carved out a home at the core of the Tokyo Productions’ workflow, serving as the hub from which Ubsdell and his team sort and ready assets before pushing them into whichever editing software he’s using for that particular project.
“I use both Premiere and Final Cut Pro X on a regular basis,” Ubsdell affirms. “Being able to prep material in Kyno and send directly to those applications or share with collaborators has really changed the way we work.”
Time-saving benefits
Ubsdell says he’s begun pushing Kyno’s exploring further every day, using its myriad features to speed up his workflow — even if it means breaking from Tokyo Production’s tried-and-true approaches.
“Instead of laboriously making folders and moving stuff around, both inside my editing applications and at the Finder level, I have found that renaming and tagging have replaced all that to a large degree — Kyno has been a key part of that process,” he explains.
“Material that’s properly tagged in Kyno acquires a level of organization that is then accessible system-wide and across applications, and that’s a big improvement.”
Other highlights that have vastly improved Ubsdell’s personal process include the ability to drill down into folder structures to find buried assets and the speedy Convert options. Kyno has also replaced Adobe Bridge in Ubsdell’s day-to-day workflow when it comes to motion graphics work. All of these features collectively spare a huge amount of hassle along the way, making production simpler, easier, and more cost-effective.
“Kyno’s power and flexibility are just so beneficial,” concludes Ubsdell. “It’s full of those useful extras that cumulatively save you so much time.”
Find out more about Kyno at kyno.software
