NewsShooter : Apple challenges RED over RAW patent legitimacy

James0b57 said:
A few people are so upset about “big business Red”, when Sony, Panasonic, and Apple are so mich bigger.

Red, aside from a connection to a guy that used to own Oakley, is a small company.
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I think it’s kind of a “jilted/cheating lover” type thing. RED was supposed to be the rebel underdog upstart on the side of the little guy and good & right and now that they are being portrayed in the negative light of being just another evil greedy company, some are reveling in their apparent perceived soon to be downfall.

But look at the Sony F5 4K debacle a few years ago. Sony out and out looked everyone directly in their eyes and lied to them. Not just bending the truth, straight up lied. AND got caught hard. NO ONE talks about it today and people still throw money at them and buy their cameras like they’re going out of style.
 
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Tamerlin said:
Of course. People envious of Red owners want to attack Red because they think that the fact that everyone wants one but no one else offers 8K somehow implies that Red is hindering the industry?

Besides, if there were any legitimacy to this bogus suit, Sony would have won when it sued Red...
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Don’t know anyone personally who’s envious of a RED owner. I’m actually glad I’ve never needed to buy one. And RED having 8K and no one else isn’t why some think they’re holding back the industry. It’s about RED claiming that no one else can record RAW internally in a camera. Personally, I think it’s a BS patent and falls under the obviousness argument and that it should have never been allowed to begin with.

And just because Sony failed, doesn’t mean Apple will(doesn’t mean they won’t, either). History is littered with legal cases that everyone thought or knew were 100% going to end up one way and they went the other. Show of hands, who remembers OJ’s murder trial?
 
Run&Gun said:
Don’t know anyone personally who’s envious of a RED owner.
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You must not pay much attention to the forums then...

They don't admit it, but the fact that there are so many people clamoring for 8K recording that they really don't need makes it quite clear.

And no, I'm not pretending that *I* need 8K either, because I don't.
 
Tamerlin said:
You must not pay much attention to the forums then...

They don't admit it, but the fact that there are so many people clamoring for 8K recording that they really don't need makes it quite clear.

And no, I'm not pretending that *I* need 8K either, because I don't.
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I do read a lot of them. That’s why I said “personally”.

If I, or most of the people I work with, needed one, we’d buy one.

But the forums and internet in general is full of people that don’t do this professionally and RED cameras are seen as an aspirational pinnacle that they can never afford or will attain.
 
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Run&Gun said:
I do read a lot of them. That’s why I said “personally”.

If I, or most of the people I work with, needed one, we’d buy one.
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I do know several... though I know a lot more people who own Reds but haven't any talent whose work looks like it was shot with a GoPro attached to a cat.

But the forums and internet in general is full of people that don’t do this professionally and RED cameras are seen as an aspirational pinnacle that they can never afford or will attain.
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It's a large portion of the indie community actually... people who would rather blame their gear for the low quality of their footage...
 
Tamerlin said:
It's a large portion of the indie community actually... people who would rather blame their gear for the low quality of their footage...
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Nothing can fix lazy or stupid, the RED cameras certainly can't fix horrible shooting conditions. I'm sure having a pile of pixels and ability to push the "developing" really hard helps, but can only go so far.
 
Greg_E said:
Nothing can fix lazy or stupid, the RED cameras certainly can't fix horrible shooting conditions. I'm sure having a pile of pixels and ability to push the "developing" really hard helps, but can only go so far.
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My point exactly.
 
Tamerlin said:
Besides, if there were any legitimacy to this bogus suit, Sony would have won when it sued Red...
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Your understanding of what happened in the lawsuit differs from mine. I think if there had been any merit to Red's original bogus lawsuit against Sony thousands of Venice, F65/F55/F5 and FS700,FS7/FS5 cameras would have been destroyed. Yet 6 years later many of us still shooting with the very same cameras that Red demanded Sony smash or smelt.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/14/...t-against-sony-over-video-compression-patents

The lawsuit calls for a sales injunction, the destruction of existing infringing cameras, and damages to the value of lost profits. It specifically names the F65, F5, and F55
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Gary T said:
Your understanding of what happened in the lawsuit differs from mine. I think if there had been any merit to Red's original bogus lawsuit against Sony thousands of Venice, F65/F55/F5 and FS700,FS7/FS5 cameras would have been destroyed. Yet 6 years later many of us still shooting with the very same cameras that Red demanded Sony smash or smelt.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/14/...t-against-sony-over-video-compression-patents
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And Sony developed its own raw codec for cameras like Venice...

Most of the patent infringement out there are quite frivolous, and it's really depressing how many of the patents themselves are complete hogwash (anyone remember Amazon's patent on photographing products on a seamless white background?).

Red's has stood up to a lot of challenges over the years, so I doubt that questioning its validity is worth the bother, so it's probably just the usual sabre-rattling that typifies most of these suits.
 
Tamerlin said:
And Sony developed its own raw codec for cameras like Venice...
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Venice uses the same RAW codecs as the F55 that Red tried to force Sony to destroy. Had Red won their lawsuit Venice presumably would been on their destroy list just like the F55 and F5.

Tamerlin said:
Most of the patent infringement out there are quite frivolous, and it's really depressing how many of the patents themselves are complete hogwash.
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I think it's quite telling that Red apparently didn't get anything they wanted in the lawsuit they initiated against Sony.
 
Nobody is wanting RED's "RAW Codec"(i.e: REDCODE) itself. The challenge is over compressed RAW recording in-general, in-camera. My understanding is they came to a settlement with Sony and none of the Sony cameras record RAW internally, they all use external recorders. RED can have REDCODE, which I believe(at least early on) is basically the "RAW" data converted to JPEG2000, but encoded/encrypted and then wavelet compression applied. This may be a vast oversimplification... Most other manufacturers already have their own RAW codecs, they just want to be able to record their own RAW codecs in their own cameras internally, as they should.
 
Atomos should design a simple monitorless device that takes raw with metadata from a USB-c port, compresses it and records it to SSD.
Problem solved!
 
Run&Gun said:
I think it’s kind of a “jilted/cheating lover” type thing. RED was supposed to be the rebel underdog upstart on the side of the little guy and good & right and now that they are being portrayed in the negative light of being just another evil greedy company, some are reveling in their apparent perceived soon to be downfall.
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They long ago switched paths, after the DSLR rev, they pivoted towards the higher end. But kept the trade up aspect.

I think the reveling is more about disliking Red in the first place.


For pro and cinema cameras, “internal” raw recording is a misnomer, these days.

Modules are so small. Even Red is a half step away from internal raw with their external ssd modules.

Internal raw is more important for cellphones. No one wants another dongle or add on to shoot raw on a cellphone.



When it comes to pro and cinema cameras, i think the whole thing is over blown. I’d rather see innovation and true RGB sensores, than more debayering.

Apple could work it out that users pay Red a $10 licensing fee to use raw on their phone, and that way only hobbyists are “paying” for the feature, but they won’t do that. Maybe Red wants the mobile cinema market. Maybe Apple will find a way to get a higher profit. But for sure, we will all be paying for it one way or another. As we should.
 
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James0b57 said:
When it comes to pro and cinema cameras, i think the whole thing is over blown. I’d rather see innovation and true RGB sensores, than more debayering.
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One of the most frustrating angles of all of these new 6k-ish cameras, is that a good number of them offer 4k supersampled from the full 6k sensor (C700 FF, Venice, Red) but none of them actually use that supersampling to record a full 4:4:4 RGB image. Everything tops out at Prores422 HQ.

As much as people go on about raw, I'm still struggling (in 2019) to get producers to pay for it. So most of what I'm shooting is either 12-bit 2k 4:4:4 or 10-bit 4k 4:2:2. Both of which I find are (ultimately) VERY comparable in overall image quality.

If the companies would use their higher resolution sensors to pad out the limitations of bayer sensors and give us 12-bit 4k 4:4:4. Then at least we'd be seeing a genuine leap forward in image quality that I can actually put to use.
 
Tom Roper said:
True 4k 444 needs 8k
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Yep, with bayer pattern sensors you need 8k to capture 4k worth of both blue and red chroma information.

6k is enough to fully compensate for the detail you lose to the bayer pattern though, so 4k supersampled from 6k will give you a full 4k in resolvable luminance detail. And (if you record the supersampled image in 4:4:4) it puts your ratio of "true" red/blue information each at 55% of your 4k luminance information (compared to just 25% each with a 4k 4:2:2 image).

My point is that you need to record in 4:4:4 (if you can't shoot raw) to really get the benefits of the additional chroma information that a 6k+ sensor can deliver to a 4k image. 55% compared to 25% gives you a LOT more chroma information to interpolate from.
 
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't trying to say "I need internal RAW recording", because yes there are other things that are way more important and would get used way more than that. In the four years that I've owned my F55, I think I've only shot RAW twice. Both times because that's what the client had to have, one of them being Sony themselves(and provided the R7 and media). I was just saying that it's completely stupid that somehow RED got the lock on recording RAW internally in a video camera. Not just a specific RAW codec like their REDCODE, but any RAW codec.
 
The problem with RAW today is you need to carry a suitcase full of hard disks. If you can pack more into the hard disks ie. if my existing 10 TB size hard disk becomes 100 TB, then we are in the game.
 
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