What is the video equipment manufacturer 'RED Digital Cinema' that Nikon announced its acquisition?
Camera manufacturer Nikon announced on March 7, 2024 that it has agreed to acquire American camera manufacturer
Makes American video equipment manufacturer RED Digital Cinema.com, LLC a subsidiary | News | Nikon Corporate Information
https://www.jp.nikon.com/company/news/2024/0307_01.html
RED Digital Cinema was founded in 2005 by Jim Jannard, founder of Oakley, a manufacturer of sunglasses and safety glasses. Mr. Jannard calls himself a camera enthusiast and wanted to offer a relatively affordable 4K digital cinema camera.
When RED Digital Cinema was first established, 2K image quality was common, but RED Digital Cinema adopted 4K resolution when developing digital cinema cameras for Hollywood. Taking on the challenge of achieving focus quality equivalent to that of a digital SLR camera without sacrificing frame rate, we developed the Mysterium sensor, which has a physical size equivalent to that of analog film. In 2006, we introduced RED ONE, the first 4K digital cinema camera.
One person who paid attention to RED Digital Cinema's digital cinema camera is director Peter Jackson , known for the movie ``The Lord of the Rings''. Director Jackson shot the short film 'Crossing the Line' in 2007 using two prototype RED ONE cameras.
Crossing The Line - Full Length Trailer - YouTube
Director Steven Soderbergh , who saw this 'Crossing the Line,' asked Jannard to lend him a prototype of RED ONE, and used it in the filming of the movie ' Crossing the Line .' RED ONE has also been used in the filming of various other movies and dramas, including the movies ``The Amazing Spider-Man ,'' ` `Prometheus ,'' ``The Great Gatsby,'' ``The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ,'' and the TV drama ` `ER. '' Masu. Cinema cameras at the time were extremely expensive, sometimes costing 20 million yen each, but the RED ONE was priced at an unprecedented $17,500 (approximately 2 million yen at the exchange rate at the time), so only professionals could afford it. It also became popular with amateur filmmakers.
As a result, RED Digital Cinema's popularity grew, and RED Digital Cinema's digital cinema cameras began to be used on Hollywood movie sets. The following is a graph showing the ``manufacturer's share of cameras used in the top 200 live-action movies in box office revenue'' from 2007 to 2018 by data company Stephen Follows . Since around 2011, the top share has been ARRI (Arnold & Richter, light blue), and the second place is RED Digital Cinema (purple). However, RED Digital Cinema's share increased to just under 20% around 2016, and has been gradually decreasing.
Production of RED ONE ended in 2012, but at the time of writing this article, models such as ``DSMC2'', ``KOMODO'', and ``V-RAPTOR'' have been released. In addition, RED Digital CinemaCODE, a unique compressed RAW format developed by RED Digital Cinema, has become a hot topic for its lossless compression that allows you to freely change the data compression rate. This led to legal battles with various companies.
For example, in 2013, RED Digital Cinema filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that Sony had infringed its RAW compression patent. In 2019, Apple filed a lawsuit claiming that the RED license for the Apple ProRes RAW codec is not recognized.
Furthermore, Nikon, which recently acquired RED Digital Cinema, is being sued by RED Digital Cinema in 2022 regarding patents for the RAW video format.
New features of Nikon's flagship machine 'Nikon Z 9' are sued for patent violation - GIGAZINE
However, it was reported that RED Digital Cinema's lawsuit against Nikon was withdrawn in April 2023 . It was thought that Nikon had come to some sort of agreement with RED Digital Cinema as to why the lawsuit was dropped, but the specifics have not been disclosed.
In a release announcing the acquisition, Nikon said, ``By making this a subsidiary, we will be able to combine Nikon, which has high reliability in product development and knowledge in video processing technology, user interfaces, optical technology, etc., with Nikon's unique image compression technology, color science, etc. By combining the strengths of RED, which has cultivated know-how in the field of cinema cameras, we will be able to develop distinctive products for professional video cameras.'' Shows potential to break into the market
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