
Apple's petition against RED - elijahparker
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/apples-petition-against-red-could-have-serious-consequences-for-hollywood
======
petedoyle
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, 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 that have better Nvidia
support.

Especially when you consider when the Mac Pro finally ships, it will probably
be up against Zen 2 Threadripper (at least 32 cores, likely more), Nvidia
GPUs, and PCIe 4.0 SSDs at a significantly lower price point. To not have
solid REDCODE RAW support would be a huge miss for Apple.

[1] [https://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/6408-apple-s-
ma...](https://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/6408-apple-s-mac-pro-
afterburner-what-just-happened)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi79vUO0GMk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi79vUO0GMk)

~~~
markdown
> Afterburner

> Threadripper

LOL are they marketing to children?

~~~
sprafa
No video professionals.

Which is to say 90% yes.

(I am one)

------
est31
> 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.

~~~
holy_city
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 prefer lossless over lossy, but there is always
the "good enough" point with storage media. Film is not lossless, so it
doesn't matter if the digital storage is. What matters is if the lossiness in
encoding is good enough to work with at the same level as film.

~~~
hvidgaard
The industry also prefers to use people with "golden ears", so they can be
pretty confident that the target audience cannot tell the difference.

~~~
holy_city
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 and m4a audio encoding that found
that only a slim number of mastering engineers preferred lossless over lossy
encoded audio (interestingly enough, some professional mixers and musicians
found lossy encodings preferable to lossless even for jazz and classical
music). But trying to convince audiophiles that those codecs are comparable to
lossless is a losing battle.

~~~
zaarn
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.

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

------
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](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”*](https://vimeo.com/351939975”*)

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

~~~
johnny-lee
The USA and certain other countries allow a grace period between disclosure of
an invention and the patent application for that invention before that
invention disclosure becomes prior art. For the USA, the grace period is 12
months, for other countries, it's 6 months.

------
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.

------
GuB-42
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 professional movie camera, one that they
invented.

~~~
KaiserPro
> 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.

~~~
Traster
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?

~~~
_underfl0w_
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.

~~~
sam_goody
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.

~~~
Spivak
I really want to know what plane of existence you're at where Macbooks are
junk. If all you care about is spec sheet per $dollar then sure you can do a
little better with other consumer laptop vendors I don't think I would ever
call them junk. Pricey for sure but leagues above similar HP/Dell/Lenovo sets.

------
sschueller
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ20yQhMYx4)

~~~
adreamingsoul
The author of those videos has his own history of being sued/suing RED.

~~~
ttoinou
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

~~~
adreamingsoul
Yes, I've watched several of his videos.

This is a controversial topic that has been the subject of a lot of discussion
lately with people who work in the industry, owners of RED cameras, and other
significant stakeholders.

------
dogma1138
So I’m guessing Apple wants to use the same technique in their new phones and
couldn’t come to an agreement with RED?

~~~
threeseed
Could be two reasons:

1) They just discovered this British inventor's work and thought it was worth
petitioning in order to save a few dollars for Final Cut Pro.

2) They plan to allow the iPhone/iPad to output to ProRes RAW and don't want
to pay the significant royalties and so have been actively looking for prior
art.

~~~
Monroe13
3) The IPR process is expensive to defend and has a high likelihood of
cancelling at least some claims, so, like many patent battles is not about the
patent at all but is about creating uncertainty and risk in order to alter the
negotiating landscape.

------
Matsta
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](https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=87045)
[2][https://www.reddit.com/r/cinematography/comments/ay3sm4/wtf_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cinematography/comments/ay3sm4/wtf_is_with_red_going_after_everyone_that_uses/)
[3][https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/blackmagicraw](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/blackmagicraw)

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

~~~
Matsta
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.

------
vfclists
From the company which patented rounded corners.

------
mnd999
I guess it’s cheaper than buying RED, which is probably plan B

------
dusted
I just came here to remark that it is very ironic that apple is fighting for
something that actually benefits not only themselves but everyone.

------
thefounder
>>...didn't make a technological break-through - they simply combined two
patents, just as any skilled artisan would have done.

That's also valid for most patents from Apple including the iphone

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
"The iPhone" isn't a patent.

There's one often-ridiculed "design patent" on the rounded-rectangle-in-a-grid
home screen layout. But these "design patents" are a lot closer to copyright
than actual patents.

The mere existence of Android phones are proof that at least one of the
following two believes or yours must be wrong:

\- That trivial stuff is easily patented

\- That Apple is willing to abuse the patent system for anti-competitive
reasons.

------
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.

------
IloveHN84
Funny how a patent warmonger company like Apple tries to fight against others'
patents, when they are on the bad side.

All these patents are now backing off too much the evolution

~~~
threeseed
Apple is a patent warmonger company ?

If that was remotely true they would be filing lawsuits all over the place. In
fact the only time I can recall them suing anyone was Samsung who is hardly an
innocent party.

~~~
Monroe13
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.

~~~
mlyle
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.

~~~
cromwellian
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars)

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

