Log seems like a strong reason to finally switch from Android to iPhone if you're a photography/filmmaking enthusiast like myself. The ecosystem is so much more mature and the gap seems to be growing not shrinking.
Android has Raw Video with MotionCam which also produces insanely good results¹ (even better than iPhone's ProRes video), but everything else just sucks.
> a strong reason to finally switch from Android to iPhone if you're a photography/filmmaking enthusiast
Correct me if I'm wrong but there's nothing stopping Android of supporting Log (or similar). I'm not a video engineer but it really doesn't seem that magic that it couldn't be supported outside of iphone 15, right? My guess that if this gains any real traction it'll show up in the next Android flagship.
I've been a long-term mcpro24fps and a user of Filmic pro before that. It's a great app, no doubt about it. The issue is not the app, but the OEMs who makes things difficult, artificially limiting the capabilities of the devices and even removing features in updates. Nothing is consistent and each device works differently from the next one, even from the same manufacturer. A long running joke in the McPro24fps Telegram chat is to never upgrade!
If RED has a patent granted with a claim on compressed RAW data streaming/storage, then it doesn't matter which algorithm. (Though of course one could argue it's too broad, but it's not cheap to make this argument.)
I am not a lawyer but I believe their patent is regarding visually lossless compression of RAW data. MotionCam uses a form of bit packing to compress frames in real time losslessly. AFAIK that is not the same thing and does not infringe on the patent. Again I could be wrong and if I turn out to be wrong I can always disable compression entirely or just run it through zstd.
I doubt their parent extends to just compressing some integers because zipping a RAW frame would not be possible which is clearly nonsense.
Does it mean they apply some kind of human perception model (like audio codecs apply a psychoacustic one) to determine what detail can be omitted without future viewers potentially noticing the difference?
> zipping a RAW frame would not be possible
why? I mean it's just a big blob, if there's a lot of similar substrings in it, it might give a few percent compression ... also, nonsense doesn't mean non-patentable, right?
> Does it mean they apply some kind of human perception model (like audio codecs apply a psychoacustic one) to determine what detail can be omitted without future viewers potentially noticing the difference?
I have not looked into it too deeply but it appears to be based on wavelet compression (more or less a copy of JPEG2000). They are able to achieve much better compression ratios. I am restricted to lossless compression (and in real time on a mobile device).
> why? I mean it's just a big blob, if there's a lot of similar substrings in it, it might give a few percent compression ... also, nonsense doesn't mean non-patentable, right?
What I mean is that it is unlikely that any form of compression of RAW video data is encompassed by their patent. But who knows.
Perhaps it could also be argued their patent covers cameras and their manufacturers, not 3rd party software that users can install on their phones? Also don’t think MotionCam has enough users for their lawyers to care. Either way thank you for your software, it’s dope
Just chiming in to say thank you for doing such a product.
Have you ever consider reaching out to any mirrorless manufacturer (maybe some form of a partnership?) about recording it's camera's sensor data? I have a Nikon and I'm still salty my Z 6I doesn't have real RAW :)
No I have not, it is likely not possible to do that anyway. MotionCam works fairly well because smartphones these days are very fast and have very fast storage. I imagine dedicated cameras are mostly made up of specialized hardware that is fairly restricted.
Android has Raw Video with MotionCam which also produces insanely good results¹ (even better than iPhone's ProRes video), but everything else just sucks.
[1]: https://youtu.be/O5fnGDR4i9w?feature=shared