Apple has lost a patent battle against high-end pro camera company RED over a method used to compress RAW video footage.
The Cupertino company had claimed that RED should never have been awarded a patent for its ProRes RAW codec because the technology was obvious…
The codec is used in RED cameras to compress RAW video as it is captured. Other companies wanting to use it in their own devices have to pay a royalty. Apple had objected to that, reports Engadget.
The patent court sided with RED, dismissing Apple’s case.
RED fired back with in-depth responses stating that its work was unique from those patents, and that it had been working on the technology prior to the timeframe that Apple had claimed.
RED took a conciliatory tone in its own comments on the decision.
Apple introduced ProRes RAW in Final Cut Pro last year.
“To be clear, as I mentioned before, this never really was Apple vs. RED. It has always been APPLE + RED, and this was all part of the process defining how we work together in the future. RED integration with Apple’s METAL framework for realtime R3D playback is coming along well and the work that the two teams are doing together is exceeding expectations. We are very excited for the new Mac Pro and the new XDR pro display and the power they bring to the entire RED workflow.”
ProRes RAW, while still compressed, lends users the added in-post flexibility of a RAW workflow. ProRes RAW affords users the ability to work with untouched image data directly from the camera sensor. This means that you gain significant added flexibility for adjusting the way your video looks in post production using Final Cut Pro X’s upgraded color correction toolset — obviously great for HDR workflows.
ProRes RAW preserves more of the original sensor data than standard ProRes flavors, but does so in a way that results in much smaller files than uncompressed RAW video formats. What’s crazy is that ProRes RAW can be even smaller than some of the older versions of ProRes.
