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Apple's petition against RED

digitalcameraworld.com

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Re: Apple's petition against RED

#21

Post by hvidgaard »

holy_city wrote: post #9
est31 wrote: post #5

> RED wanted to find a way to make digital compression visually lossless (i.e. no perceivable loss in quality). What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.

Having worked a bit in the field (on the audio side of film) "perceptually lossless" means that in a double blind study, an audience would not be able to discern between the lossless and the lossy encoded versions. The only way to verify is by testing with real people, and due to the nature of the business, it's easier to do it with professionals who have a higher bar for perception. There are a lot of reasons to pre…

The industry also prefers to use people with "golden ears", so they can be pretty confident that the target audience cannot tell the difference.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#22

Post by Joeboy »

est31 wrote: post #5

> RED wanted to find a way to make digital compression visually lossless (i.e. no perceivable loss in quality). What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.

It means lossy. I think the actual situation, which the article kind of misstates, is that footage from cinema cameras like RED's is likely to undergo significant grading and postprocessing, which is where compression artifacts are likely to become a problem. Annoyingly, "Raw" as applied to video codecs seems to be a marketing term that means "you can grade it and still probably not notice compression artifacts."

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#23

Post by sprafa »

markdown wrote: post #18
petedoyle wrote: post #11

I believe the recently announced Afterburner card for the upcoming Mac Pro is an FPGA. [1] Maybe they're trying to make a reconfigurable accelerator? Would be amazing to be able to decode REDCODE RAW, ProRes RAW, etc, then turn around and reprogram the FPGA to accelerate encoding of H.264/H.265/AV-1/etc faster than a CPU could. Further, I think RED has a pretty close relationship with Nvidia [2]. For RED customers, i…

> Afterburner > Threadripper LOL are they marketing to children?

No video professionals.

Which is to say 90% yes.

(I am one)

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#24

Post by est31 »

onion2k wrote: post #15
est31 wrote: post #5

> RED wanted to find a way to make digital compression visually lossless (i.e. no perceivable loss in quality). What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.

In audio compression most codecs remove data outside of the typical human hearing range to improve the compression ratio - people can't hear that part anyway so there's no reason to save it. I guess RED wanted to do the same thing for visual data.

Yes and back when it was introduced with MP3, many people were really mad about it because it made quality much worse. Nowadays encoders are better and with high enough bitrates you can't tell a difference to lossless.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#25

Post by GuB-42 »

IANAL but if we allow software patents that should be valid.

It may not take a genius to do what they did (Apple's point) but:

- There are the first to do it.

- They are using it commercially in their own products, they are not just trolls.

- They didn't just patent an idea. They built a whole system around it. REDCODE is not just a compression algorithm. It is a compression algorithm optimized for a certain type of professional movie camera, one that they invented.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#26

Post by rzzzt »

Joeboy wrote: post #22
est31 wrote: post #5

> RED wanted to find a way to make digital compression visually lossless (i.e. no perceivable loss in quality). What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.

It means lossy. I think the actual situation, which the article kind of misstates, is that footage from cinema cameras like RED's is likely to undergo significant grading and postprocessing, which is where compression artifacts are likely to become a problem. Annoyingly, "Raw" as applied to video codecs seems to be a marketing term that means "you can grade it and still probably not notice compression artifacts."

Is this one also a marketing term, then? Would calling a video codec "lossy" have any bad consequences for the product?

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#27

Post by holy_city »

hvidgaard wrote: post #21
holy_city wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked a bit in the field (on the audio side of film) "perceptually lossless" means that in a double blind study, an audience would not be able to discern between the lossless and the lossy encoded versions. The only way to verify is by testing with real people, and due to the nature of the business, it's easier to do it with professionals who have a higher bar for perception. There are a lot of reasons to pre…

The industry also prefers to use people with "golden ears", so they can be pretty confident that the target audience cannot tell the difference.

There's a weird bar for confidence, to be frank. Most often I've found that people disregard studies with people who have "golden ears" because they're not average ears, or that studies find that only those with "golden ears" can find a difference, and the audience tends to feel they're in that range.

For example, there was a study a few years ago at McGill with trained listeners on the effects of bitrate with mp3 and m4a audio encoding that found that only a slim number of mastering engineers preferred lossless over lossy encoded audio (interestingly enough, some professional mixers and musicians found lossy encodings preferable to lossless even for jazz and classical music). But trying to convince audiophiles that those codecs are comparable to lossless is a losing battle.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#28

Post by sschueller »

REDs patent might not be valid according to this video [1]. Also red continues to label its products as "Made in the USA" when they are not qualifying the requirements set to be allowed to do so. In fact they may not even qualify to label the products "Assembled in the USA"

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ20yQhMYx4

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#29

Post by acchow »

GuB-42 wrote: post #25

IANAL but if we allow software patents that should be valid. It may not take a genius to do what they did (Apple's point) but: - There are the first to do it. - They are using it commercially in their own products, they are not just trolls. - They didn't just patent an idea. They built a whole system around it. REDCODE is not just a compression algorithm. It is a compression algorithm optimized for a certain type of…

> - They didn't just patent an idea. They built a whole system around it. REDCODE is not just a compression algorithm. It is a compression algorithm optimized for a certain type of professional movie camera, one that they invented.

If they're so much more than a patent, then they shouldn't need a patent.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#30

Post by adreamingsoul »

sschueller wrote: post #28

REDs patent might not be valid according to this video [1]. Also red continues to label its products as "Made in the USA" when they are not qualifying the requirements set to be allowed to do so. In fact they may not even qualify to label the products "Assembled in the USA" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ20yQhMYx4

The author of those videos has his own history of being sued/suing RED.
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