iPhone 13 Pro and ProRes
Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2021 8:03 pm
iPhone 13 Pro will record ProRes up to 4K 30p (ProResRAW would be actually more fun).
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=147396
Howard Roll wrote:Wouldn’t Prores Raw require a Ninja? Last time I checked, Apple fought the law and the law won. They’d need to cook up something raw-like similar to Braw or Canon Raw Light.
Good Luck
Andrew Kolakowski wrote:That would break RED patent- still storing pure RAW pixels.
You would have to mess with RAW data a bit, so it's not pure RAW anymore (then compress). Do it the way so it's reversible and at the end you can still have real RAW pixels if needed.
Hendrik Proosa wrote:This is the problem of RED patent, it is pile of garbage. One can devise gazillion ways to do developed raw though, for example: do bilinear interpolation of photosite values per color, which is a simple method of debayering.
I know, right? Imagine a company thinking they could patent a Raw imaging system, let alone a heat management system!Hendrik Proosa wrote:This is the problem of RED patent, it is pile of garbage. One can devise gazillion ways to do developed raw though, for example: do bilinear interpolation of photosite values per color, which is a simple method of debayering. Then downscale the result of red and blue by factor of 2 by bilinear filter. Store with pseudo-log curve encoding and compression of choice. I’m not a mathematician and can’t tell but I have a hunch that doing bilinear for interpolation and downscale could make original values recoverable pretty well. Even better would be nearest neighbor downscale but this is too… primitive
It's so unjust that a two trillion dollar mega-corporation ($700,000/min.) lost to a tiny upstart!Andrew Kolakowski wrote:Another way is splitting frame into chunks as their patent specifically mentions above HD (or 2K) resolution.
I think Sony was at war with RED but Sony holds a lot of patents around compression and RED had to give up.
RED patent as it stands ( way not specific enough) should be never granted, but now no one wants to admit it.
RED goes also after recorders otherwise ATOMOS would never pay a penny them. Atomos doesn’t touch camera in any way- those are strictly external recorders.
2028-04-11 Anticipated expiration
Right - Apple can’t afford good lawyers.Andrew Kolakowski wrote:No- it lost against government which won't accept fact that they made mistake in the past.
Fact that RED is "made" of lawyers is also important here.
Not sure what exactly it means but:2028-04-11 Anticipated expiration
so not that long left.
You’d think Apple could already collect all the data they like seeing as there are billions of iPhones worldwide. Your argument has zero merit.Howard Roll wrote:Red was sitting on the Patent for about 7 years before anybody started making any fuss over it. I think that played a major part in their legal success. Blackmagic came to the party almost a decade later and wanted to challenge Red’s IP? I can see how the judgment went in Red’s favor. If the patent had been challenged by Silicon Imaging/Cineform I think we’d have seen a different outcome.
At this point it’s a win for mfr’s because they can iterate their product lines with compressed raw in 2026. The downside is that they’ll be free of the Red yoke only to don the Apple version as Prores Raw slowly becomes the defacto standard over the next 5 years. Apple is happy to share their IP as long as they can harvest the associated data.
Good Luck
JonPais wrote:Right - Apple can’t afford good lawyers.Andrew Kolakowski wrote:No- it lost against government which won't accept fact that they made mistake in the past.
Fact that RED is "made" of lawyers is also important here.
Not sure what exactly it means but:2028-04-11 Anticipated expiration
so not that long left.
Apple has successfully overturned over 200 patents, but for some reason, the government won't cooperate when it comes to RED? Whatever you say, Andrew! As a matter of fact, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has been dubbed the death squad because it has invalidated more than 2,000 patents since it began work in 2012. Your argument has no merit whatsoever.Andrew Kolakowski wrote:JonPais wrote:Andrew Kolakowski wrote:No- it lost against government which won't accept fact that they made mistake in the past.
Fact that RED is "made" of lawyers is also important here.
If you fight against government then lawyers quality means not much
They can easily rule against you, specially when it comes to things like patents (not some murder case etc. which can make angry general public).
Apple argued that RED’s patent was not patentable because it was an obvious invention and their case was thrown out. End of story. Your contention that RED has been able to prevail because they are ‘all lawyers’ is preposterous, as Apple has an army of upwards of 500 lawyers - greater than the entire workforce of RED combined - with an astronomical budget of one billion dollars. Apple has sparred with tech giants like Samsung thousands of times larger than RED; if their case had any merit at all, they could squash RED like a little bug on a windshield. Yet even with all that ammunition, Apple was unable to show that RED’s patent should be overturned. We established beyond any reasonable doubt that the statement "...it lost against government which won't accept fact that they made mistake in the past." was patently false, as the courts have overturned thousands of patents. We also discredited the ludicrous theory that Apple uses ProRes RAW to harvest data. LOL What Graeme Nattress did when the other major players were dozing off was nothing short of revolutionary. As a matter of fact, what is indefensible are the pathetically weak attempts seen online to belittle RED’s achievement; efforts that, one by one, have all been proven to have no basis in fact.Andrew Kolakowski wrote:If you read a bit of RED patent you can see it's a very broad patent. Those don't get easily granted. Most patents are related to very specific subject/novel way of doing things. RED patent is far from it, so fact that they ever been granted it for me stinks. But at the end I don't care much about it
JonPais wrote:What Graeme Nattress did when the other major players were dozing off was nothing short of revolutionary.
JonPais wrote:Apple argued that RED’s patent was not patentable because it was an obvious invention and their case was thrown out.Andrew Kolakowski wrote:If you read a bit of RED patent you can see it's a very broad patent. Those don't get easily granted. Most patents are related to very specific subject/novel way of doing things. RED patent is far from it, so fact that they ever been granted it for me stinks. But at the end I don't care much about it
While Apple has always been a little tight-lipped about exactly how ProRes is able to outperform so many other codecs, the basics are pretty straightforward.
Apple is absolutely not hated by professionals in the industry for anything to do with ProRes at all. Let me be perfectly clear: never in my life have I heard any professional in the industry say anything negative about Apple in relationship to ProRes. Not once. Not by Deakins, not by anyone. On the contrary, the professionals I'm familiar with embrace ProRes. The best cameras in the world have ProRes, from ARRI to RED to Panavision to the Sony Venice to Blackmagic to the 4D. Apple products and Apple customers are very important to the success of Blackmagic. As recently as last month, Grant Petty felt compelled to take a stand against some of the malicious falsehoods being spread online about Apple and Apple's products. Most professionals I'm familiar with have nothing but positive things to say about Apple and Apple products. And that includes Ben Allan:Andrew Kolakowski wrote:While Apple has always been a little tight-lipped about exactly how ProRes is able to outperform so many other codecs, the basics are pretty straightforward.
ProRes doesn't really outperform other intermediate codecs. It's solid, well optimised etc, but there is absolutely nothing novel or unique there. If anything it's time to actually look for possible improvements. I want to see eg. REAL RGB mode, like DNxHR or Cineform do.
So much hated by many fact about Apple controlling ProRes is actually one of its main strengths and this is the key reason why ProRes is used so often. It simply works regardless of application, which is not always the case for DNxHR, Cineform etc.
It's not amazing technically at all. Its implementations are controlled, all are decent and this is main beauty.
Never have I heard anything about anyone having to pay millions to anybody and it is simply not so that professionals in the film industry harbor ill will toward Apple or ProRes; and we really need more Grant Pettys in the world to step up and quell this sort of misinformation on the internet - which can do real harm - as he did in no uncertain terms last month. If someone were to utter these half truths at a SMPTE conference they would be roundly ridiculed by the entire industry.Andrew Kolakowski wrote:Well you have not spoken with developers years ago.
Most of the were furious as the could not get ProRes license from Apple (regardless if you were well established and recognised company). Those who were lucky had to deal with restrictions, like eg. only Windows Servers OS were allowed to run encoding. It was long and in the same time not that long time ago.
Now it's all past and settled, but use to be very different
Myths are still live though and you hear everyday that you need to pay millions for ProRes encoding license
Of course ProRes looks better, but still iPhone image is what it's (over-processed etc.).
Apple could simply raise bitrate for h264/5 or introduce I only mode and have basically same end effect. Of course Apple wants to promote their tech + they already had ProRes implemented on the chip.
ProRes RAW would be way more interesting, just purely due fact it could save space, but for those who want to shoot movies on iPhone ProRes is good.
If David had such a $ and corpo behind Cineform there would be probably no ProrRes today as from technical point it represent nothing special at all. Cineform still represent most advanced tech (with dynamic metadata, RAW mode with debayering 'in codec' etc) even if it's such an old technology.
As I said- ProRes is liked for other than tech part reasons. It's good, but don't see any reason to praise it so badly. In last 15 years there has been nothing done in terms of intermediate codecs and there is a LOT what could be.
Andrew Kolakowski wrote:Apple could simply raise bitrate for h264/5 or introduce I only mode and have basically same end effect.
Frank Engel wrote:Andrew Kolakowski wrote:Apple could simply raise bitrate for h264/5 or introduce I only mode and have basically same end effect.
Going "I only" with h.264 would make the footage worse unless it is accompanied by a much later increase in bitrate. This is because the individual I-frames would take more bandwidth and if the bit rate is still limited they would need to be compressed much more heavily, throwing away a lot more data that could have otherwise been retained.
JonPais wrote:Nothing could be further from the truth than to argue that Apple has been complacent with regard to ProRes, as the new MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max chips and their ProRes encoders and decoders strikingly illustrate.
Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve has added support for Apple's new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, which developers claim runs 5X faster on the new MacBook Pros. Developers can make their apps take full advantage of the more powerful CPUs and GPUs of the chips. Resolve now supports hardware acceleration for the Apple ProRes codec.
And to imply that Apple is standing still when it comes to video codecs would be an outright fabrication. Apple and Atomos announced ProRes RAW just three years ago and by the end of 2023, it will have been implemented on nearly 50 cameras, supported by a half dozen NLEs and monthly activations will exceed 2,600/month.
I’m not in the mood for playing whack-a-mole any longer, I’m out.Andrew Kolakowski wrote:As far as I know ProResRAW was Atomos idea not Apple’s. Apple helped them, as the see more $ in it.
Every support for new camera is Atomos + camera manufacturer work, not Apple’s. Apple’s work is ProRes on chip, but with their resources it’s fairly easy task.