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Apple's petition against RED

digitalcameraworld.com

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Re: Apple's petition against RED

#71

Post by kelsolaar »

Joeboy wrote: post #69
kelsolaar wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm disagreeing with the "Virtually all video capture is lossy" which is simply not true. ARRI cameras and especially the Alexa are some of the most used cameras in the movie industry and the Alexa Raw format is lossless.

Those cameras also record ProRes though, which I would expect to be used far more commonly. At least outside of $100m+ movies where money is no object. Edit: I had a look at https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/cannes-2018-camera-cinemat... and annoyingly I have to admit that ARRIRAW looks to be much more popular I expected among smaller features. Like 10/32 specifically mention it, and some of the others are ambiguous.

Sure they can but Directors and DOP will favour a Raw file format, e.g. ARRIRAW or R3D over ProRes. Disclaimer: I work in the industry and I'm in touch with most of the camera vendors either directly or indirectly and with a lot of people using them too. I'm also a user.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#72

Post by Joeboy »

kelsolaar wrote: post #71
Joeboy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those cameras also record ProRes though, which I would expect to be used far more commonly. At least outside of $100m+ movies where money is no object. Edit: I had a look at https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/cannes-2018-camera-cinemat... and annoyingly I have to admit that ARRIRAW looks to be much more popular I expected among smaller features. Like 10/32 specifically mention it, and some of the others are ambiguous.

Sure they can but Directors and DOP will favour a Raw file format, e.g. ARRIRAW or R3D over ProRes. Disclaimer: I work in the industry and I'm in touch with most of the camera vendors either directly or indirectly and with a lot of people using them too. I'm also a user.

Yeah, it seems like I significantly underestimated the amount of ARRIRAW capture going on (see my edit above).

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#73

Post by kmlx »

_underfl0w_ wrote: post #70
Traster wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I don't understand, you seem to be saying that RED produce bad cameras, encode their files in a trivial way and then provide crap post-processing tools. They weren't even first to market. So why does anyone use them?

You seem to be expecting consumers to make completely logical decisions on these matters. Past a certain saturation threshold, name recognition alone can be enough to tip the scales of consumer preference. That's exactly why people still buy Apple hardware at all anymore - their friends/peers already have them. It's surely not due to superiority by any metric for the price point.

"That's exactly why people still buy Apple hardware at all anymore - their friends/peers already have them. It's surely not due to superiority by any metric for the price point."

I challenge this assumption. The iPad Pro is by far the best computing device for a certain subset of the market, not to mention the extremely fast Apple-made CPU. The Apple ecosystem is also leading in some of their features. And privacy-wise they are a step ahead of their competitors.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#74

Post by huffmsa »

> Combining two existing patents isn't novel

Okay, bevelled rectangles.

Instead of pinching pennies like a depression era farmer, maybe Apple should spend some of that $250B in cash to aquire RED.

They get the patent, and the royalties AND can put RED sensors in their iPhones and charge another $250/unit.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#75

Post by colejohnson66 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #52
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…

> so they used their own SSD pack things.

Minor nitpick: they’re miniPCIe SATA (not NVMe) SSDs in a fancy housing with some fancy pin remapping for the outer connector

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#76

Post by KaiserPro »

Traster wrote: post #68
KaiserPro wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm sorry but I don't understand, you seem to be saying that RED produce bad cameras, encode their files in a trivial way and then provide crap post-processing tools. They weren't even first to market. So why does anyone use them?

Correct.

When they first came out, they had some excellent promise. They were the first digital 4k movie camera. So if you wanted a digital end to end 4k workflow, for about 4 years, RED was the only show in town. However, if you wanted to use normal lenses and dump direct to a normal plate format, the alexa was what you really wanted.

A rundown:

Firstly, you couldn't buy or hire one, you had to know someone.

Secondly you had to get a bunch of adaptors for _everything_, which drove up the cost significantly

Thirdly no global shutter meant that it wobbled horribly when you panned left and right.

Fourthly its colour was off, and noisy as hell(visual noise) (some later generations are practically colourblind. cough hobbit cough)

If they had actually produced and shipped the RED one, when they said they would, then my opinion would have been different. If they'd shipped the epic on price and spec, again, they could have transformed the film industry. But they didn't. By the time 4k digital workflows were practical for most people, RED had lost its shine.

Why do I personally dislike them?

Because, whilst there are some lovely people that work there, the level of cultism and secrecy is frustratingly annoying.

I'm trying to do VFX on a shot, I've been given a couple of TB of .r3d files, it takes 30 second a frame to put into a useable format. Even then I have to fiddle with it, because the colour profiles are all messed up, or some other stupid issue.

I talk to the RED team, they try and sell me a $5k card that only works in a mac (I was working at a linux shop at the time)

Fortunately Nuke 5/6 had native .r3d handling, which meant that we could drop out to the farm and blast through all the footage at once, with decent conversion options.

Why did people used them?

Size

They are much smaller than a film camera. Its practical to mount them on a moving rig, hand operate, etc, etc, etc, without loss of quality

Mobility

Because there is no film, you can bump them, wobble them, sit them next to explosions and not worry that the film is warping.

4K

way more resolution to play with. This means that you could push the ISO more and just half the resolution and get usable footage. which you had to do, making it basically an Alexa competitor

The key difference between the RED One and the Alexa, is that the Alexa couldn't record to an onboard device, the RED could. Also the resolution of the Alexa's sensor was lower, but the sensor size was correct. It also had a much greater usable dynamic range than the RED one.

The concept was nice, the company, and the fanboys can get to fuck.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#77

Post by KaiserPro »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #75
KaiserPro wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> so they used their own SSD pack things. Minor nitpick: they’re miniPCIe SATA (not NVMe) SSDs in a fancy housing with some fancy pin remapping for the outer connector

https://www.cinema5d.com/whats-inside-a-red-mini-mag-the-con...

This is new to me, I didn't think it was that simple. They harped on in the old days about how revolutionary the minimags were.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#78

Post by Tuna-Fish »

jobigoud wrote: post #41
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…

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?

Quality degrades, just as it would if you did the same with film.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#79

Post by Matsta »

Joeboy wrote: post #66
Matsta wrote: post #65

Also to note, this is probably the same reason why Blackmagic dropped CinemaDNG [1][2](Adobe's raw video format) and made their own version - Blackmagic Raw [3] [1] https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=87045 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/cinematography/comments/ay3sm4/wtf_... [3] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/blackmagicraw

Although BRAW isn't really equivalent to CinemaDNG - the former is lossy and the latter isn't.

Correct - it was more of the legal issue. The cool thing is that these cameras have FPGA's in them, is that they can support new codecs without and changes to the hardware.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#80

Post by sam_goody »

_underfl0w_ wrote: post #70
Traster wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I don't understand, you seem to be saying that RED produce bad cameras, encode their files in a trivial way and then provide crap post-processing tools. They weren't even first to market. So why does anyone use them?

You seem to be expecting consumers to make completely logical decisions on these matters. Past a certain saturation threshold, name recognition alone can be enough to tip the scales of consumer preference. That's exactly why people still buy Apple hardware at all anymore - their friends/peers already have them. It's surely not due to superiority by any metric for the price point.

I disagree about Apple. Their laptops are junk hardware, agreed.

But the iMac is competitive for a machine with its specs, especially if you add in the advantage of OSX (IMO, better than Linux or Windows for a large-screen desktop).

And the iPhone/iPad line are the only mobile devices with decent specs, decent apps, and not built on Adware and privacy leakage. Worth money if you can afford it.

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