Japanese court overturns Red RAW video patent | Hacker News Reader

Japanese court overturns Red RAW video patent

dpreview.com

122 pointsanigbrowl26 comments

Thank god. The actual patent (roughly; I researched it myself, but a few years ago so memory fuzzy) involves compressing frames/video before debayering which makes the streams more easily compressible; instead of after debayering, and as part of a camera (internal RAW). Yeah.

Wasnt the patent pretty much "and then I dump raw sensor data to a JPEG2000 codec"?

Yes, this is pretty much what REDCODE is.

In the past 15 years, I have purchased five Lumix cameras including the new L10 (which I have yet to receive). I like their cameras a lot. The dedication to pursue this battle is another reason I am certain to buy more.

Unless I’ve missed it; Lumix has nothing to do with this long standing patent battle. Could you elaborate on the supposed relationship?

Lumix is a brand of cameras owned by Panasonic, the people who fought this battle in court.

Don't the Lumix cameras support 4k recording with the Apple ProRES codec? https://www.dpreview.com/news/3429948804/apple-loses-patent-...

Ah fair, I forgot Panasonic owned Lumix.

Though the lawsuits are more complex with multiple parties suing RED, of which Nikon also fought RED and ended up buying them out to win that side of the battle. On the panasonic side it was more of their cinema line of cameras rather than Lumix that was the driver (though they have trickle down)

And prores isn’t necessarily RAW, it’s just one of the variants.

....what? Lumix and Red cameras have almost no market overlap. Only one model series even comes close to Red's cheapest camera.

> Lumix and Red cameras have almost no market overlap.

Wrong, in the sense that market overlap doesn't matter. Here's an example of a Micro Four Thirds camera (system stewarded by Panasonic) that had to nerf its RAW output in a firmware update due to this patent:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220828070504/http://www.person...

> Z-CAM […] violated the famous RED patent and will pay for it soon

> The ZRAW actually stores RAW directly from Bayer sensor and not YUV as claimed (conversion happens in computer software, camera stores real linear raw). It means that they actually store real RAW on Z-CAM E2!

https://web.archive.org/web/20250906030132/http://www.person...

> ZRAW is not RAW anymore.

> After firmware v0.94.1 it's an AES-encrypted MOV-container-corrupted overXORred shit, that contains only HEVC bitstream.

I think you have your answer right there.

Patents last at most 20 years. So the troll got 18 years out of it, and a great expense to the public and many companies involved fighting it. Trolls and lawyers win again. Everyone else loses.

Can somebody give a ELI5 of what "RAW video" actually is? I was always under the impression that it's just a dump of the "raw" uncompressed and uncorrected data coming from the sensors, meaning it's hardware dependent and unstandardized, and Wikipedia seems to agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format

So what exactly is patentable here? Or is this the bone of contention here?

It's not the idea of RAW that's being patented, but rather components of "Red RAW" that includes things like compressing before debayering, as the other comment points out. I also remember hearing something about Red having a patent on directly recording to swappable SSDs or something ridiculous like that as well..

It is. What was patented was the compression:

“ The camera can be configured to transform blue and red image data in a manner that enhances the compressibility of the data. The data can then be compressed and stored in this form. This allows a user to reconstruct the red and blue data to obtain the original raw data for a modified version of the original raw data that is visually lossless when demosaiced. Additionally, the data can be processed in a manner in which the green image elements are demosaiced first and then the red and blue elements are reconstructed based on values of the demosaiced green image elements.”

> ELI5 of what "RAW video" actually is

Video with high bit count per pixel. A finished video is 8-bit per pixel, but RAW video contains 10 to 14 bits per pixel, often in a camera-specific LOG format which has very low contrast and saturation and looks washed out. All of this helps preserve much of the detail and allows creators to have more flexibility in post-processing.

> has very low contrast and saturation and looks washed out

When shown under naive linearization and compression rather than good tone mapping

I totally get what you're saying and that is how film people talk about it but as a camera engineer it's annoying that people think washed out low sat is some intrinsic property of log.

No, its about (de-)bayering. It's before the concept of multi-color 'pixels'.

I think the patent literally covers the idea of a camera that records raw video internally. (Still cameras supported raw for years before Red existed.)

This is a terrible patent (it's basically a list of features) and unfortunately Red was able to milk it for almost 20 years.

> One possibility the abolition of the license fees reportedly due to Red from users of Apple’s ProRes RAW codec.

This would be great but I’m not going to hold my breath.

If it was filed in 2008, wouldn't the patent have expired in 2028 anyway? Or am I missing something?

yee, welcome visitor from the future

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional#Fak...

I've been waiting for this result for a long time - great news!!

"Raw” is not an acronym.

Wow that’s big!

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