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Apple's petition against RED

digitalcameraworld.com

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Re: Apple's petition against RED

#31

Post by acchow »

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…

> it'd stink to buy a beefy Mac Pro and not be able to edit 8K REDCODE RAW as well as they could on other OSes

I don't think this lawsuit will have any bearing on REDCODE hardware decode on Mac OS. Especially since it would likely be RED who is responsible for that support.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#32

Post by ttoinou »

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…

   - There are the first to do it.
What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arriflex_D-20 ? And video codecs already existed before RED... So basically it is about compressing the RAW output of the sensor.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#33

Post by Joeboy »

rzzzt wrote: post #26
Joeboy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Virtually all video capture is lossy, even on multi-million movies, because lossless capture is still fairly impractical in terms of storage, and there's generally not much advantage over a good lossy codec. But I don't think film people generally know that, and I suspect some of them would get upset if you tried to make them use a "lossy" camera.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#34

Post by Someone »

Does it legally matter when RED had this working, rather then when they filed for a patent?

If so, it would seem you can game the system by documenting your invention well, only filing for a patent years later.

Also, if that’s true, comparing when you made the invention to when others filed for a patent is unfair.

That should be a concern for RED, as a comment on https://nofilmschool.com/red-camera-apple-patent-challenge says:

”We were using a SI2K (Ari Presler camera) in August 2006... The first two shots of my reel were done with the first version of that camera, it was a sensor with a lens connected to a PC through Gigabit Ethernet...

https://vimeo.com/351939975”*

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#35

Post by arghwhat »

ttoinou wrote: post #32
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…

- There are the first to do it. What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arriflex_D-20 ? And video codecs already existed before RED... So basically it is about compressing the RAW output of the sensor.

... Which has been done in photography for single frames far longer than this patent has been around. Adobe launched their DNG RAW format in 2004, for example.

The only reason for not doing this to video earlier was just a question of bandwidth and storage limitations. RAW footage is massive, and we might have forgotten just how bad the storage situation was over a decade ago.

As Apple says, RED has brought nothing to the table that an orangutan of average intellect would not have been able to come up with when storage mediums were finally capable of keeping up with RAW video footage.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#36

Post by pas »

megaremote wrote: post #19
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 can only mean lossy. It makes no sense to talk about visually lossless if it is exactly the same image.

PNG is truly lossless yet smaller than raw BMP.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#38

Post by okcando »

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.

Lossless unqualified would mean lossless: recoverable exactly bit-for-bit, like PNG, FLAC, or ZIP.

The only reason to describe a system as visually or perceptually lossless is because the encoding is lossy, even if very good, like an MP3 or JPEG at their highest quality settings.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#39

Post by zaarn »

holy_city wrote: post #27
hvidgaard wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

As someone with minor audiophilia, there is still some difference; when you have a lossless version, you can reencode to any lossy version without loosing quality over time.

I can transcode FLAC to Mp3 fast enough to stream it on my phone without issue, if I decide to use OGG or Opus or anything else, I don't have eventual reencoding issues.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#40

Post by Joeboy »

arghwhat wrote: post #35
ttoinou wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- There are the first to do it. What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arriflex_D-20 ? And video codecs already existed before RED... So basically it is about compressing the RAW output of the sensor.

... Which has been done in photography for single frames far longer than this patent has been around. Adobe launched their DNG RAW format in 2004, for example. The only reason for not doing this to video earlier was just a question of bandwidth and storage limitations. RAW footage is massive, and we might have forgotten just how bad the storage situation was over a decade ago. As Apple says, RED has brought nothing t…

> has been done in photography for single frames far longer than this patent has been around. Adobe launched their DNG RAW format in 2004

Interestingly BlackMagic removed recently CinemaDNG (basically multi-frame DNG AIUI) from their cameras citing patent threats from RED.

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