But the patented part is treating each channel separately; the actual compression algorithm isn't at issue (which, in Red's case, is JPEG2000).
That said, as soon as you get into colorspace conversions or color sampling conversions (like YUV, etc), you're baking in choices and dealing with quantization and roundoff errors. If you want the most pristine image possible for dealing with it in post, you want the raw photosite information. And if you want that, without deBayering (which introduces those same errors!), you get to pay Red a royalty check.
I don't make the rules, I'm just pointing out what the stakes are here. Yeah, it's pretty fundamental and obvious now, but at the time no one was selling a professional video camera with a single chip for that price. It was a different world.
> So the novelty is that they separate R,G and B planes before compression?
> Yeah, it's pretty fundamental and obvious now, but at the time no one was selling a professional video camera with a single chip for that price. It was a different world.
I don't see how no such cameras being on the market makes the software any less obvious, unless we are totally abdicating the meaning of "obvious" to reduce it to "non-novel". But if that were the law's intent, it wouldn't require non-obviousness and novelty - just one or the other would suffice.
The obviousness test seems to vary by jurisdiction, but typically requires that someone with ordinary skill in the field would not likely come upon that solution[0]. It must also be novel[1].
> someone with ordinary skill in the field would not likely come upon that solution
This requirement often appears to be effectively ignored, as in this case. Compressing the raw data (i.e., before transformations like de-bayering) is a pretty obvious thing to try out. This sort of run-of-the-mill development does not deserve a 20-year monopoly.
Amazon's one-click patent is probably the most famous example of this. Anyone with any database programming experience can figure out "store the customer's payment details and shipping address and use them later to complete purchases". That was also true in 1999.
The patent office seems to evaluate the requirements in a manner very favorable to patent applicants/holders. I think that's a bad thing; the criteria for what counts as an invention should be stricter.
It was obvious then too. Way back when I was taking the raw grayscale data before debayering and I immediately saw I'd need to treat each color's pixels separately. No background in compression or signal processing or anything, just a tinker's mindset and some experience faffing around in Photoshop/GIMP
But the patented part is treating each channel separately; the actual compression algorithm isn't at issue (which, in Red's case, is JPEG2000).
That said, as soon as you get into colorspace conversions or color sampling conversions (like YUV, etc), you're baking in choices and dealing with quantization and roundoff errors. If you want the most pristine image possible for dealing with it in post, you want the raw photosite information. And if you want that, without deBayering (which introduces those same errors!), you get to pay Red a royalty check.
I don't make the rules, I'm just pointing out what the stakes are here. Yeah, it's pretty fundamental and obvious now, but at the time no one was selling a professional video camera with a single chip for that price. It was a different world.