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.
> 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
I don't think this lawsuit will have any bearing on REDCODE hardware decode on Mac OS. Especially since it would likely be RED who is responsible for that support.
> 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 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.
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 < HD res.
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.
It means lossy. I think the actual situation, which the article kind of misstates, is that footage from cinema cameras like RED's is likely to undergo significant grading and postprocessing, which is where compression artifacts are likely to become a problem. Annoyingly, "Raw" as applied to video codecs seems to be a marketing term that means "you can grade it and still probably not notice compression artifacts."
Lossless unqualified would mean lossless: recoverable exactly bit-for-bit, like PNG, FLAC, or ZIP.
The only reason to describe a system as visually or perceptually lossless is because the encoding is lossy, even if very good, like an MP3 or JPEG at their highest quality settings.
I'm finding some of the disagreements under this comment frustrating. Movie people, please don't redefine what lossless actually means. If you find a way to encode say a cryptographic key, or a text document, say, your employment contact, through the codec and then retrieve it back and it comes back garbled or useless, it's lossy! It doesn't matter if you can't see a difference with visual data, it has changed the data. That is lossy. That is what lossy means. That is what it has always meant and that is what it always will mean. And if you try to change the meaning for a narrow context driven by marketing, well, words cease to have a meaning, don't they.
In audio compression most codecs remove data outside of the typical human hearing range to improve the compression ratio - people can't hear that part anyway so there's no reason to save it. I guess RED wanted to do the same thing for visual data.
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 playback venue (different for large IMAX, normal theater, home theater and small phablet; and different to a degree depending on an individual's would-be double-blinded or bio-electrically/fMRI measured thresholds.) The goal of pseudo-"lossless" compression is to be very conservative on what to throw out because transcoding to other formats can always (and must) optimize (throw away) data later... it really is marketing wank because there is some compression, but the idea is it's aimed to be minimal as to not matter in the final cut product.
”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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> - 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.
If they're so much more than a patent, then they shouldn't need a patent.
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.
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) 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.
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]
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.
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.
You are criticizing them for making use of a system they have no choice but to aggressively participate in or face destruction by someone who does. Patent right payments and lawsuits are in the billions.
[+] [-] petedoyle|6 years ago|reply
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...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi79vUO0GMk
[+] [-] acchow|6 years ago|reply
I don't think this lawsuit will have any bearing on REDCODE hardware decode on Mac OS. Especially since it would likely be RED who is responsible for that support.
[+] [-] markdown|6 years ago|reply
> Threadripper
LOL are they marketing to children?
[+] [-] est31|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|6 years ago|reply
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 < HD res.
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.
[+] [-] Joeboy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msbarnett|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelsolaar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ent|6 years ago|reply
> i.e. no /percievable/ loss in quality.
would be pretty redundant otherwise.
[+] [-] okcando|6 years ago|reply
The only reason to describe a system as visually or perceptually lossless is because the encoding is lossy, even if very good, like an MP3 or JPEG at their highest quality settings.
[+] [-] megaremote|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mung|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ijiiijji1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone|6 years ago|reply
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 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”*
[+] [-] pedrow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluesign|6 years ago|reply
Patenting years later is basically giving right to people to use your patent, if you started implementing before the patent date.
[+] [-] IshKebab|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoz-y|6 years ago|reply
But then a lot of patents seem to be frivolous.
[+] [-] GuB-42|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] acchow|6 years ago|reply
If they're so much more than a patent, then they shouldn't need a patent.
[+] [-] icebraining|6 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] ttoinou|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ20yQhMYx4
[+] [-] adreamingsoul|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogma1138|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Matsta|6 years ago|reply
[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
[+] [-] Joeboy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vfclists|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnd999|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dusted|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefounder|6 years ago|reply
That's also valid for most patents from Apple including the iphone
[+] [-] IfOnlyYouKnew|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
All these patents are now backing off too much the evolution
[+] [-] threeseed|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rapsey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croh|6 years ago|reply