Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple's petition against RED

digitalcameraworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 89 posts

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#41

Post by jobigoud »

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…

But what happens when you make multiple roundtrips with this perceptually lossless codec? Is it still passing the test or does it degrade over time?

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#42

Post by bluesign »

Someone wrote: post #34

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-chall…

As I understand it matters against “prior art” defense. Basically if you patent someone else’s work, it invalidates the patent. But if you can prove that, you are the first to work on this, doesn’t really matter when you patented.

Patenting years later is basically giving right to people to use your patent, if you started implementing before the patent date.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#43

Post by ttoinou »

Joeboy wrote: post #40
arghwhat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

Yeah that sucks. But nobody is forced to update the firmware. And you get BRAW if you update :)

EDIT: What is AIUI by the way?

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#44

Post by IshKebab »

Someone wrote: post #34

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-chall…

Yes. If they released it publicly in 2007 they can't then go and patent it in 2008.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#45

Post by yoz-y »

From an engineering perspective this does seem trivial and something that would be on a table in almost any pipeline that needs to get a speedup and allows for post processing.

But then a lot of patents seem to be frivolous.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#46

Post by KaiserPro »

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…

> 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

Ah, no.

redcode is jpeg2000 in a tar file, with some metadata goop.

They didn't invent it, they spent a lot of time trying to obfuscate it, and were very put out when the VFX industry reverse engineered it. Whats worse, for a good few years the tools they made to support it were horrific. Red rockets were fragile FGPA boards that cost $5k, broke within months. The cameras themselves used to have terrible colour and rolling shutter.

They were not the first to make digital cinema cameras, they weren't even the best or cheapest at the time.

They _are_ trolls, a big example is "REDCINE-X PRO" which is a carbon copy of the foundry's Hero (well its ancestor.)

In short RED are almost as annoying to deal with professionally as Apple(Hint: I've done both, at the same time). RED have worse fanboys though.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#47

Post by ttoinou »

adreamingsoul wrote: post #30
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.

But did you watch the video (hence his arguments) to make up your mind?

Maybe the fact that he's reporting about the patent is linked to his own history with RED

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#48

Post by kelsolaar »

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 is a lossy compression codec derived/based on JPEG2000: https://peter.schlaile.de/redcode/

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#50

Post by icebraining »

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…

Patents (software or not) must non-obvious as well:

"A patent may not be obtained though the invention ... if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains."

Apple is saying this one is just an obvious application of pre-existing patents.

Post reply on HN