The 30th episode of RED Centre marks its one year anniversary, occasion enough to point out that it is one of my very favorite podcasts, despite my not owning a Red. Mike Seymour, of fxguide and fxphd, and director/shooter Jason Wingrove consistently turn out snappy, entertaining and thoughtful episodes. They follow my rule of great podcasting: rather than imagine what they think an audience might want to hear, they simply have conversations about things that interest them. In other words, they make the show they would want to listen to. When Jason and Mike think out loud, we all learn together. And their interviews are not journalism as much as they are opportunities to eavesdrop on the bleeding edge of digital cinema.

Someone asked me recently why I'm not more of a fan of RED, which was a surprising enough question that I want to clarify something here: I am a fan of RED. There are now 35 posts on this blog tagged with RED. By comparison, there are 31 tagged with photography. Yes, many of those RED posts are critical, but understand this: if I take the time to post critical essays about something, that means I like it. If I'm not interested I won't waste the keystrokes or your time.

I like the RED One camera—what it represents, and what it has the potential to be. I like it so much that I desperately want it and RED's future cameras to be as great as I see that they so easily could be. This is why I encourage RED to develop industry-friendly standardized workflows, to be honest about their dynamic range claims and provide a way of shooting that acknowledges the requirements of film delivery, and to keep their priorities on the filmmaker when designing new products.

I am also cautious about getting swept up in the excitement that RED is so masterful at generating, and I encourage you to be as well. I am lucky enough to get to share my tempered excitement and thoughts directly with Jim Jannard himself. I can't get anyone at Canon to return my calls or emails (not even when I post in Japanese) despite owning a closet full of their gear.

RED is great enough and frustrating enough that it needs a great podcast to help us sort it all out. Fortunately for all of us, we have exactly that. Thanks for a great year Mike and Jason—here's to many more.

Subscribe to RED Centre in iTunes.

Browse all RED Centre Episodes (including the couple that I've been on, 17 and 22).

Follow Mike and Jason on twitter.

Man, it's like watching supermodels mudwrestle for the chance to give you a backrub.

It's nice to know there's a RED employee who looks almost exactly like me—that will help when I try to sneak into their shop.

As promised, Panasonic today announced the video-equipped successor to the DMC-G1, their Micro Four Thirds not-an-SLR that conspicuously lacked video. Called the DMC-GH1, it was the talk of Twitter today.

And deservedly so. As promised, it's all the juicy photography things the G1 was and more, plus HD video from a company with a terrific track record in that area that spans the high end to the proletariat. Panasonic, after all, brought 24p to the masses with the DVX100. Like Canon, they have long made terrific stills and video gear. Unlike Canon, it seems that Panasonic allows those divisions to talk to each other.

The GH1 is the first stills camera with video that reflects true attention to the video part. Remember that Panasonic not only brought us 24p DV, they also brought us HD on the desktop (even the laptop!) with their compressed-just-the-right-amount-for-today DVCPROHD format. Panasonic knows video, and that knowledge is reflected in the GH1. Its AVCHD formats are readily supported by the major video editing packages, and the press release proudly touts "a Creative Movie mode, which lets the user set the shutter speed and aperture manually to make even more impressive movies."

Manual settings. Finally, somebody swallowed the Obvious Pill.

Further evidence that Panasonic is a video company that makes a stills camera that shoots video: You can record until your card fills up. Autofocus works—the right way (smooth not fast). There's a flip-out LCD for shooting things other than your identical twin. There's a whole button just for shooting video. At any time. And it's red.

So a company well known for pioneering filmmaker-friendly camcorders and killer stills gear finally put the chocolate and the peanut butter into the awesomizer and hit frappé. What's to complain about?

Thanks for asking. First, as I said, Panasonic knows video. I don't even like to use the term video. When I first held my DVX100, I saw it as the first accessible Digital Cinema camera, not a video camera. Video is tapes and signals and pluge (pluge?) and vertical blanking. Digital cinema is pixels and fricking movies.

Panasonic's focus on capital-V video is evident in the GH1's 24p recording method. It encodes the true 1080p24 off the sensor into a 1080i60 stream, via 3:2 pulldown. That means it's recording redundant (bandwidth-wasting) information to the video file. It falls to you to remove the pulldown in post, adding numerous headaches and necessitating careful attention to avoid recompression.

AVCHD supports 1080p24—in fact, Panasonic's own HMC150 records it. Why did Panasonic force 3:2 pulldown (which is to 24p as stone tablets are to the Kindle 2) on the GH1? Maybe they were desperate to have something about their HD cameras be better than this little game changer. More on that in a bit.

Because while we're in the one-step-forward, two-steps-back department, we also have to talk about the lens. The GH1 comes with a kit lens that, like most kit lenses, goes the Microsoft route of doing everything poorly rather than doing one thing well. The LUMIX G VARIO HD 14-140mm/F4.0-5.8 ASPH./MEGA O.I.S. lens (yes, seriously) is mandatory with the GH1, and follows the kit lens mandate of being slow-as-heck in order to be lightweight, affordable, and provide a broad range of focal lengths.

Presumably we film folk are interested in the GH1 because of its big-ass sensor and the shallow depth of field that it portends. So how stoked are we going to be shooting at between f/4 and f/5.8? Not. So we'll be buying more cute little lenses and swapping them often. One step forward, two steps back.

It's funny how the badass little LX3 shows up its big brother in a few key ways. The LX3 shoots lightly-compressed 24p movies that are actually 24p. And its tiny little lens is f/2.0 at the wide end.

So the GH1 isn't perfect. What's to be excited about then?

Everything. Especially this:

The Micro Four Thirds sensor is almost as big as that of the RED One. It's nearly Super35 in size. It dwarfs the nearest prosumer video camera sensor size.

There is a camera coming this summer that has a sensor nearly as big as the RED one's, takes interchangeable lenses, and fits in the palm of your hand. It has full manual control, state-of-the art automatic features (not just face detection, face recognition), and shoots both 24p and 60p.

And it will cost less than $2,000 (rumored) with a lens.

Panasonic has the kintamas to make a stills camera that would make one think twice about buying a much more expensive HD video camera. From Panasonic.

And that is why I love them.

Remember the original (now dead) Scarlet? It's here in a couple of months, cheaper by a third, and has a bigger chip and swappable glass. If you don't mind a little compression.

Now we just gotta see some footage (uhm, I mean real footage, not this). Panasonic, if you're using those dual Venus Engine HD image processors to make that video right (downsampling rather than line-skipping or pixel-binning), you may just have made the ultimate camera for the DOF-obsessed Rebel.

Let the Subway Shorts commence!

Folks following me on Twitter and watching the comments here have noticed that I'm a bit obsessed with an offhanded comment made on the Rebel Café. In response to some technically sound but rather dry sample footage from the Ikonoskop A-cam dII, Gage replied:

I need to see a subway short.

After I cleaned the coffee off my keyboard, I contemplated the profundity of that statement. See, it wasn't long ago that when a new camera showed up, we wanted to see test shots of Macbeth swatches and resolution charts. Or at least we thought we did. But lately, some crazy filmmakers have brought art to a technology fight, and they are kicking ass. There's the D90 Subway test, and one shot with the RED One as well. And there's Reverie, AKA The Bourne Zoolander (you know I love you Vincent). These aren't really short films, they're emotional trigger experiments. They're camera tests designed to tickle our cinema bone rather than satisfy our slide-rules. They promise a cinematic feel rather than razor sharp 4K filmouts. We watch them on our computer screens and on our TVs. You know, where we watch everything.

For every piece of footage that seemingly proves that the Nikon D90 D-Movies are unusable, there's at least one that shows how great the footage can look if you work within the camera's limitations. Ditto the 5D MkII. Folks seem less interested in how a camera fares on a test bench than how it handles being serupticioulsy weidled in a no-photography zone. After Gage's comment, the Ikonoskop guys actually posted a tiny clip that's kinda like a subway short!

I told Gage I'd make t-shirts, and I did (all credit goes here). Proceeds go toward buying Gage a beer.

A month ago I wrote that "buttons and features and resolution charts just had their ass handed to them by sex apeal," and now that movement has a mantra. So when a camera company comes at you with specs and megapixels and data rates, you know what to tell them.

I need to see a subway short.

...by the time the Scarlet Bolex might become available, we might also have the above camera. Micro 4/3 format, interchangeable lenses and autofocus (probably), HD video and 12 megapixel stills (most likely), all for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 (pure conjecture, although the G1 is currently only $800 with a lens).

You'll have to weigh 3K raw vs. whatever compressed video format Panasonic chooses for the Lumix G (we usin' code names) of course. And there's always the chance that Panasonic will do something stupid to limit the G's professional use, like skipping 24p or hampering manual control. But more than any other camera company, Panasonic has shown the ability to overcome engineering inertia and do the important next thing. We have them to thank for consumer 24p—which we take for granted now, but was a monumental event that Canon and Sony were slow and reluctant to follow.

I for one can't wait to see the subway shorts.

Oh yeah, and:

UPDATE: Looks like the prototype LUMIX G has an AVHD badge on the back (thanks to dcloud for the link in the comments). That's good news, it's a post-friendly codec supported by many NLEs.