Originally posted by RonHendriks1966 Wow! Would that mean that we can record FullHD clips up to 25 minutes? With K-5 we can only run up to 5'22". And still have the same image quality?
The AVCHD/H.264 format that the K-01 uses is very space efficient but requires significant processing power to compress before storing on the SD card. Pentax likely had to upgrade their image processing engine to handle AVCHD, which I suspect led to Prime M. IIRC I can get 60 minutes on a 16Gb card.
On the flipside, it's also processor-intensive to edit. New editors like Final Cut Pro X can handle the files natively, but you'll also need a swift computer that can handle decoding the stream and overlaying color correction and effects on the fly.
If you've got an older computer or software that can't handle AVCHD natively, you can still edit the files but you'll need to transcode it into a more edit-friendly format like Apple ProRES or Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). These codecs are built for editing - they've got very little (if any) interframe compression for the software of CPU to worry about. So they are easy to work with but take up tons of hard drive space. So the process in this situation is AVCHD -> transcoded to ProRES or AIC -> edits -> render to H.264 for web or elsewhere.
One more note - the AVCHD spec calls for a rats nest of folder on the SD card. On the GH2, mine are stored in the Private/AVCHD/BDMV/Stream folder. File organization is nothing like handing JPGs or .PEFs or .DNGs, so read the manual before you go moving stuff around.
There's a new learning curve for video, but it's fun!
Hope this helps!