[kens]

I read the claims, and this patent really is as stupid as described - filming a yoga class from the back. The only thing of interest in the claims is having a "corridor" without students so they don't block the view of the teacher. Prior art is basically anyone who ever said "Can you guys move out of the way?"

Edit: The patent has a flowchart, which looks like a satire of patent flowcharts. It's a two-page flowchart of how to film a yoga class with silly steps like "Students arrive and set up their yoga mats", "Loaded into video editing software". It doesn't even make sense as a sequence of steps.

This is a much worse patent than the Amazon "white background" patent which at least describes a few things that aren't totally obvious to me, such as the positions and brightness of the lights and the choice of lens. (These things may be obvious to a skilled practitioner, though.)

Yoga patent: https://www.google.com/patents/US8605152

White background patent: https://www.google.com/patents/US8676045

[tigeba]

Regarding the white background patent, I'm by no means a professional photographer but the majority of the items in their patent strike me as basic if not incredibly obvious to a photographer that specializes in this type of work. The first figure is a 4 point lighting setup, something that you could find in hundreds of different textbooks. Their lens selection ( 85mm ) is in no way novel. There is always some debate, but many photographers prefer either an 85mm or 100mm for portraiture. If you look around you will find groups dedicated to taking portraits with the Canon 85mm 1.2L. I'm having a hard time finding how their claim does anything other than describe almost every photography studio in existence. Many video and photo studios even have a white cyclorama built right into the walls, it is almost their default behavior to facilitate what the patent claims to be unique.

It is possible that their specific claims relate to some of their very specific ratios and distances, but it seems like a stretch to me.

[lotsofmangos]

I've commented this before, but Amazon's white background patent stresses that it achieves a seamless background with no need for post-processing.

There is a very good reason for this.

When this technique was developed, post-processing was done with a wand in a darkroom and electronic computers were yet to be built.

edit - actually, if you replace the camera with an audience, the effect predates photography. Infinity cycloramas being a popular set building technique in 19th century German theatre.

[mcintyre1994]

That flowchart is bizarre. I don't understand how "live stream occurs in realtime" happens after downloading the recorded video and editing it. Is this the process of making a recorded yoga video appear to be live?