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.
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.
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.
> 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:
> 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!
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..
“ 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.”
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.
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.)
