apple patents keyframing.

[Bob Woodhead]

It must be some subset of keyframing…. seems incredible they could patent something that existed at least as far back as ADO (Ampex Digital Optics, for you young’uns).

“Constituo, ergo sum”

Bob Woodhead / Atlanta
CMX-Quantel-Avid-FCP-Premiere-3D-AFX-Crayola
“What a long strange trip it’s been….”

[Andy Neil]

It looks like the patent is in specific to how keyframes are manipulated. Not keyframing itself. Patent language is always over-broad in the abstract, but when you read the specifics, it has to do a lot with how keyframes are moved and eased.

For example, they described a situation where the user sees a collapsed view of their keyframes in bar form (like FCPX currently displays them). Then the user only needs to drag in between two keyframes to create an ease curve.

It also describes how multiple keyframe groups can be selected and moved forward or back in time with a click-drag operation.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Brett Sherman]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “well, thats not over-broad at all.”

Welcome to the U.S. patent system. Just because a patent is given does not actually mean it is valid. It’s just expensive to prove otherwise. Companies like Apple use patents as an arsenal for both defense and offense against other companies or patent trolls.

[Bret Williams]

Way to patent the suckiest part of FCP.

[Jim Giberti]

[Bret Williams] “Way to patent the suckiest part of FCP.
“

Yeah, how about patenting the spinning beach ball.

[Timothy Auld]

Patent law these days is surreal. People found business with the sole idea of suing for patent infringement. I was just reading about some goofballs who are suing anyone providing public WI-FI saying they have a patent on it. From what I understand in their corporate literature they say they they have no intention of going after folks using WI-FI in their own homes “at this stage.”

Tim

[Bret Williams]

If you’re on MacPro, you’ll get the spinning beach ball before a crash. Now that I’m on an iMac, crashes are much more efficient. It skips the beach ball altogether an goes straight to the crash. Progress.

[David Eaks]

I want to patent “patent trolling” and start suing the patent trolls for infringing on my patent. LOL

Like Andy said, its manipulation, not the idea of keyframes in general. Anyway, I also see that a lot of this keyframe manipulation patent is very similar to what is currently in FCPX. I Hope we will see some improvements to keyframing soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple has seriously hobbled features because they must “own” the method they “invented” before ever announcing its existence.

I actually like where FCPX is going with keyframing. I’d like to see a “half-collapsed” keyframe editor view, that only shows attributes that have keyframes applied. Sometimes the stack gets way too tall, especially with more than one clips keyframes expanded. Also, if any keyframe is beyond the I/O points of a clip, it would be great if just that parameters “track” would visibly extend to the keyframes position so you could easily grab and move it.

[Clint Wardlow]

[TImothy Auld] “Patent law these days is surreal. People found business with the sole idea of suing for patent infringement”

If we want to give it a label, we could call it “pulling a Darl McBride,” named after the former CEO of the SCO Group (aka SCO unix). If I remember correctly he tried to save his flagging company by claiming patents on Linex code. He was the devil incarnate as far as the open source community was concerned.