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  • Hacker News
  • Wow that’s big!
    by looksjjhg
  • "Raw” is not an acronym.
    by strogonoff
  • I've been waiting for this result for a long time - great news!!
    by grokcodec
  • If it was filed in 2008, wouldn't the patent have expired in 2028 anyway? Or am I missing something?
    by jujube3
  • yee, welcome visitor from the future
    by pestatije
  • > 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.

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

    by decimalenough
  • 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.)
    by wmf
  • > 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.

    by hebelehubele
  • 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.”

    by anon48293
  • 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..
    by picture
  • 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.
    by panny
  • 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.
    by Wistar
  • ....what? Lumix and Red cameras have almost no market overlap. Only one model series even comes close to Red's cheapest camera.
    by KennyBlanken
  • Unless I’ve missed it; Lumix has nothing to do with this long standing patent battle. Could you elaborate on the supposed relationship?
    by dagmx
  • 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.
    by dannyw
  • Wasnt the patent pretty much "and then I dump raw sensor data to a JPEG2000 codec"?
    by rasz