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Apple's petition against RED

digitalcameraworld.com

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Re: Apple's petition against RED

#51

Post by kelsolaar »

Joeboy wrote: post #33
rzzzt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should define what lossy means for you because your statement is incorrect for me. Shooting Raw with an ARRI Alexa is lossless, this is not the case when you shoot R3D (Raw for RED). R3D is using JPEG2000 compression and will effectively destroy the data the sensor captured to some degree. This can have dramatic consequences when doing green screen keying and/or shooting in low light.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#52

Post by KaiserPro »

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.

Cinema cameras need to be able to record at 4k (real 4k, 4048x2028) at upto 32bit per channel. 24 times a second.

Thats a lot of data. Now, RED at the time didn't have a way of recording to large disk arrays, (unlike the alexa) so they used their own SSD pack things.

This limited the amount of space, and shooting time.

So they needed a way of doing more than RLE compression.

This meant that they had to start chucking away some data. With standard JPEG, you throw away 3/4 of the blue and green channels (kinda, its a different colour space) and then compress the rest.

The problem? in VFX the blue and green channels are crucial for "pulling a key" (green/blue screen work, the less clear, the more manuakl cleanup needed, which costs $$$). So all that 4k resolution will be useless because in practice, the bit that the VFX team need will be So RED used JPEG2000 that uses wavelets to compress things. Roughly speaking, instead of storing a per pixel value, you group chunks of the image together and store the _change in frequency_, that is the difference in colour between pixels.

This doesn't reduce the resolution so much and doesn't produce square artefacts like oldschool JPEG. The problem is that its quite CPU intensive. To the point that it would take >30 seconds to decode a frame.

GPUs make it trivial to do it in real time now, but back then, its was a massive faff.

Also, RED are masters of bullshit and marketing. There is quality loss, its just they never tell you that.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#53

Post by KaiserPro »

ijiiijji1 wrote: post #16
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.

The resolutions of 4K/5K/8K with completely lossless at high frame rates or at native sensor resolution in terms of storage for hundreds/thousands of hours of source material for marginal audiophile-like puritanism/placebo magical beliefs is just way too expensive for essentially no marginal return, because there are fundamental limits to psychovisual and psychoacoustic thresholds that no human can discern in a given…

Yes, for customers, I agree.

For VFX, no.

That extra resolution, and crucially colour dynamic range means that less time and money had to be spent cleaning up green screen masks.

It also means that there is more scope to do things like Day-for-night, change the colour temperature, and have full artistic freedom to change the look and feel of a movie without reshooting.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#54

Post by pedrow »

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…

There's a a difference between 'first to file' and 'first to invent' in patents. Most (all?) territories use the former, but the US only changed in 2013. Not sure how that applies retrospectively. More detail in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_inv...

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#56

Post by hvidgaard »

zaarn wrote: post #39
holy_city wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For archival purposes, it makes no sense to store anything less than lossless.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#57

Post by Joeboy »

ttoinou wrote: post #43
Joeboy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

"As I Understand It"

Edit: By the way BRAW is a lossy format - not knocking it, it looks like it's probably great for most purposes, but if you really want lossless format like CinemaDNG, BRAW is not that.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#58

Post by cromwellian »

mlyle wrote: post #12
Monroe13 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has filed more inter partes review petitions than any other company since the process came available a few years back. IPRs are very expensive for a patent owner to defend (low- to mid-six figures) so from the patent owner perspective Apple definitely fits the description of warmonger. Of course, if you think these patents are junk that never should have issued, Apple is doing God’s work.

Sure but the original comment was > Funny how a patent warmonger company like Apple tries to fight against others' patents Implying that Apple is a particularly aggressive company when it comes to patent enforcement . Which I think most all of us can agree they're not Qualcomm or IBM.

Apple has sued for plenty of patents before including suing for “data detectors”, eg linkifying onscreen text or adding actions based on regexp or other pattern matching, some trivia and obvious to most engineers and with prior art in old email/news readers.

They also had a habit of suing over trivial and obvious design patents. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars

However they are no where close to some of the worst offenders.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#59

Post by Joeboy »

kelsolaar wrote: post #51
Joeboy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should define what lossy means for you because your statement is incorrect for me. Shooting Raw with an ARRI Alexa is lossless, this is not the case when you shoot R3D (Raw for RED). R3D is using JPEG2000 compression and will effectively destroy the data the sensor captured to some degree. This can have dramatic consequences when doing green screen keying and/or shooting in low light.

Is the part you're disagreeing with "there's generally not much advantage over a good lossy codec"? There are definitely times it's not true, but I think I covered myself with "generally". Most footage is shot with adequate exposure and doesn't require keying etc.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#60

Post by rasz »

IshKebab wrote: post #44
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.

they had provisional application out in April 2007.
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