"RED Is destroying the camera industry"

[JaccoW]

Last week Youtuber Theo Rants posted a video about the business practices of RED Digital Cinema Camera Company.
PetaPixel summarized it here but the essence is that the company owns a overly broad patent that is currently stifling innovation.

Their patent is for compression on a camera of RAW video for 4K or higher. Not a particular method, but the very concept of using compression of the RAW video stream itself.
This is important because at those resolutions the file sizes are enormous and overly large files cripple editing as well. Or in the case of DJI, it makes wirelessly recording from a high quality stabilized sensor possible.

And RED has been actively suing several manufacturers already. DJI has had to cripple it Ronin 4D, demanded Sony destroy its cameras and has recently sued Nikon.

I have no love for this kind of (IMHO) patent trolling but what do you think? Are they just defending their business or is this well into anti-competitive practices territory?

 

[Philbo King]

Patents have changed. Except for rare instances of true innovation, they no longer protect garage inventors. They are more of a corporate market-share strategy tool.

 

[chelgrian]

Last week Youtuber Theo Rants posted a video about the business practices of RED Digital Cinema Camera Company.
PetaPixel summarized it here but the essence is that the company owns a overly broad patent that is currently stifling innovation.

Their patent is for compression on a camera of RAW video for 4K or higher. Not a particular method, but the very concept of using compression of the RAW video stream itself.
This is important because at those resolutions the file sizes are enormous and overly large files cripple editing as well. Or in the case of DJI, it makes wirelessly recording from a high quality stabilized sensor possible.

And RED has been actively suing several manufacturers already. DJI has had to cripple it Ronin 4D, demanded Sony destroy its cameras and has recently sued Nikon.

I have no love for this kind of (IMHO) patent trolling but what do you think? Are they just defending their business or is this well into anti-competitive practices territory?

You forgot Apple failing to get Red's patent overturned.

Red had to settle with Sony as Sony counter sued and have such a deep imaging patent portfolio they could have easily put Red out of business.

Nikon is almost certainly counter sueing and I expect a settlement.

Red's patent expires in 2028

 

[LTig]

I think in the EU such a patent won't be granted. This "invention" misses new ideas.

 

[sarumbear]

I have no love for this kind of (IMHO) patent trolling but what do you think? Are they just defending their business or is this well into anti-competitive practices territory?

That is not patent trolling. It’s morally correct patent protection. Are you disagreeing with patent system?

 

[sarumbear]

I think in the EU such a patent won't be granted. This "invention" misses new ideas.

I disagree. Maybe you should read the patent.

 

[SIY]

Patents have changed. Except for rare instances of true innovation, they no longer protect garage inventors. They are more of a corporate market-share strategy tool.

They very much can if the garage inventor is a worldly one. Plaintiffs can get attorneys on contingency, defendants cannot. And one understands that very often the goal is not necessarily to win a court case, but to get a money payout.

 

[Gorgonzola]

I think in the EU such a patent won't be granted. This "invention" misses new ideas.

According to my limited understanding, the USA issue a huge number of patents and many of them are for trivial processes that are merely smart engineering ideas that don't represent any thing actually new.

A few year ago I had an occasion to look briefly atd the huge patent inventory of Dell computer. It was evident to me that very many were simple computer assembly and handling process that any an industrial engineer worth his/her salt might have figured out.

In fact in the USA at least, many patents are filed with the implicit purpose of making money by sue violators even, or especially, inadvertent violators.

 

[LTig]

Here is the link to the patent. We will see ...

 

[charleski]

I disagree. Maybe you should read the patent.

You mean this patent granted in 2012?
The one that protects "converting the light received by the light sensitive device into raw digital image data having a horizontal resolution of at least 2 k at a rate of at least greater than twenty three frames per second; compressing the raw digital image data into compressed digital image data such that the data remains substantially visually lossless upon decompression; and recording the compressed digital image data at a rate of at least about 23 frames per second onto a storage device of the camera."?
Yeah, that's a whole bunch of remarkable innovations ...

 

[LTig]

You mean this patent granted in 2012?
The one that protects "converting the light received by the light sensitive device into raw digital image data having a horizontal resolution of at least 2 k at a rate of at least greater than twenty three frames per second; compressing the raw digital image data into compressed digital image data such that the data remains substantially visually lossless upon decompression; and recording the compressed digital image data at a rate of at least about 23 frames per second onto a storage device of the camera."?
Yeah, that's a whole bunch of remarkable innovations ...

Well, there is more to it than just this but in principle I agree.

 

[sarumbear]

You mean this patent granted in 2012?
The one that protects "converting the light received by the light sensitive device into raw digital image data having a horizontal resolution of at least 2 k at a rate of at least greater than twenty three frames per second; compressing the raw digital image data into compressed digital image data such that the data remains substantially visually lossless upon decompression; and recording the compressed digital image data at a rate of at least about 23 frames per second onto a storage device of the camera."?
Yeah, that's a whole bunch of remarkable innovations ...

I don’t know your background in imaging but that is a revolutionary invention which changed the cinematography completely and created a new industry around it. If it is not remarkable as you see then maybe you may consider selling your services to Apple whose army of legal experts and lawyers failed to crack it.

 

[sq225917]

It's a bullshit patent, and entirely obvious, especially as compression was already used in 1080p cameras beforehand. I can't believe it got granted.

 

[Vive la dissonance!]

I don’t know your background in imaging but that is a revolutionary invention which changed the cinematography completely and created a new industry around it. If it is not remarkable as you see then maybe you may consider selling your services to Apple whose army of legal experts and lawyers failed to crack it.

Hey! You! I'd like you to dismantle this decrepit, crumbling eyesore building, whose owners refuse to do anything other than relentlessly sue anyone who blocks their "view", with this plastic spork, the only tool the law currently allows. Have fun!

 

[sarumbear]

It's a bullshit patent, and entirely obvious, especially as compression was already used in 1080p cameras beforehand. I can't believe it got granted.

Do you know how Red Raw works?

How can you colourise a compressed image?

 

[charleski]

I don’t know your background in imaging but that is a revolutionary invention which changed the cinematography completely and created a new industry around it. If it is not remarkable as you see then maybe you may consider selling your services to Apple whose army of legal experts and lawyers failed to crack it.

The patent application was made in 2008. It was granted in 2012. h264, the compression technology that enabled compression of 1080p (2K) material in a practical way, was finalised in 2003.

No. In 2008 this was very much not remarkable. But Red was the first to get a patent that combined this (rather obvious) combination of existing technologies, which is why their patent is proving hard to overturn. That doesn't mean it's not an abuse of the patent process.

 

[valerianf]

It is a patent that is at the core of RED business model. Customers can only by RED storage solutions because of this patent.
They pay a high price for standard ssd hardware.
A few years ago a company started to propose a low cost compatible solution for the storage but a RED lawsuit made them stop this business.
I am very happy to read that this patent will become public in 2028.

 

[sarumbear]

The patent application was made in 2008. It was granted in 2012. h264, the compression technology that enabled compression of 1080p (2K) material in a practical way, was finalised in 2003.

No. In 2008 this was very much not remarkable. But Red was the first to get a patent that combined this (rather obvious) combination of existing technologies, which is why their patent is proving hard to overturn. That doesn't mean it's not an abuse of the patent process.

You do not know what RED RAW is. It’s obvious with your comparison to h264.

RED was years ahead of everyone else, they gave filmmakers the power by giving them access to the sensor data in a way that it's taken other companies nearly a decade to catch up to. Do that with h264!

 

[chelgrian]

That is not patent trolling. It’s morally correct patent protection. Are you disagreeing with patent

You do not know what RED RAW is. It’s obvious with your comparison to h264. RED was years ahead of everyone else, they gave filmmakers the power by giving them access to the sensor data in a way that it's taken other companies nearly a decade to catch up to.

ARRI Alexa came out two years after the Red cameras with uncompressed ARRIRAW, hence not being affected by Red's patents.

You will see far more ARRI than Red on film sets.

All Red did was remove the demosaic step in the camera image pipeline before putting the frame through what boils down to JPEG2000 compression.

The reason no one had done this before wasn't because they hadn't thought of it but because the amount of compute time needed to edit such data was prohibitive on the general purpose computers of the day. Red originally needed an ASIC based accelerator card to make editing tractable these days the required compute kernel can be run on a GPU.

I can guarantee you this process had been thought of and dismissed due to the editing problems very much earlier than the point Red patented it however no one thought to publish, and thus establish prior art.

 

[sarumbear]

ARRI Alexa came out two years after the Red cameras with uncompressed ARRIRAW, hence not being affected by Red's patents.

You will see far more ARRI than Red on film sets.

All Red did was remove the demosaic step in the camera image pipeline before putting the frame through what boils down to JPEG2000 compression.

The reason no one had done this before wasn't because they hadn't thought of it but because the amount of compute time needed to edit such data was prohibitive on the general purpose computers of the day. Red originally needed an ASIC based accelerator card to make editing tractable these days the required compute kernel can be run on a GPU.

I can guarantee you this process had been thought of and dismissed due to the editing problems very much earlier than the point Red patented it however no one thought to publish, and thus establish prior art.

So it was original art that they were the first to achieve. That’s when you were granted a patent. If the patent is worthless there’s no argument but there was, even in this thread. Argument over.