Red, raw and the stupidity of us patent law

/vid/ - Why raw isn't recorded internally more often and why red are dickheads

So red (RED, the guys who make the ultra-high end cinema cameras with insane specs that DPs ignore to instead continue using ARRIs) have a patent on raw video compression. So, companies basically can't compress internal raw video without red suing them. Blackmagic had to change from cinema dng to braw because of this.

>Is it correct that you can circumvent RED's raw compression patent by using external means of recording raw
It's correct, the same reason why sony uses the axs-r7 backpacks on all of their cameras to record compressed raw and the older and bigger canon Cs (currently only the c700) uses codex backpacks or have atomos compatibility, everything varicam also only outputs raw to external recorders.
The patent covers a certain way of compressing raw footage in camera. Manufacturers stay away from anything compressed raw whenever they can and don't have a very clear new way like "partially debayering" (aka basically not using raw).

>This seems like a hilariously stupid oversight if it was true
Yep. Only some ways of compression (or using straigt up uncompressed raw to codex or internally like arri) can safely circumvent that patent. Even Apple lost in court very recently and has to forward royalties to red when licensing prores raw to be recorded in camera, for example with kinefinity or in some drone camera manufacturers looking into it.
https://www.dpreview.com/news/3429948804/apple-loses-patent-lawsuit-will-have-to-pay-red-royalties-for-prores-raw-format
It's super stupid but the patent is extremely powerful and really hit some manufacturers like sony hard, they might have played a totally different role in the emerging digital cinema world but red has tried to sue them back and forth basically since their first cameras.
https://nofilmschool.com/2013/02/red-ceo-jim-jannard-lawsuit-sony-raw-compression

>As far as one can figure, this seems like it's either a hilarious oversight legally that the patent was ever granted, or else RED is really abusing it in ways they shouldn't be able to
It's both, it's a super vague apple style patent "rectangular electronic device with rounded corners" and at the same time using a shittonne of lawyer work hours to enforce it as brutally as possible so they can push even much larger brands in a corner for a decade.
Brought to you by the US patent system.

>So how does Blackmagic's braw get around this?
bBackmagic raw is "partially debayered" in camera.
I haven't taken apart the codec as some other people have by far because I'm too dumb, if you're interested in detailed analysis there's a lot of stuff you can find on the blackmagic forum and whatnot.
But basically broken down real hard it works like this:
-the picture is debayered in camera in a lower resolution while using some smart sensor specific downsampling trickery
-that picture is now a reference for what the underlying raw data is actually doing, meaning where the "subpixels" are located in relation to a full color pixel and how they're contributing to it
-that way you have some more information about which pixels to throw away "safely" when downsampling, not only in camera but when debayering in resolve at a lower resolution, which speeds up the whole process and seems to give a pretty good picture without needing to read out the full raw frame and then downsampling it's basically just grabbing what it actually needs
Also that debayered information is going to the internal compression, which is then able to work on the raw file but it can treat it like subpixels, if that makes any sense. It knows about which pixels contribute mostly to luma or to color and therefore can "throw away" information in a smarter way. The camera is basically looking at each raw frame through the lens of a full color file attached to it and bases it's compression on that instead of the wavelet transforms and whatnot used in redcode and basically everything else.

So braw is the following:
-not as "raw" as most other files, information is lost as with any compression, but it works completely different than redcode while being about as efficient in file size
-yet not "baked down" to rgb means you can still change the white balance as you want
-preview and scrubbing speed is absolutely fantastic, it's super light on the decoder because of the debayered information still being in there somewhere, as I said reconstructing lower resolutions even at the same time is easy