Panasonic Lumix GH1 AVCHD video recording notes
I’ll keep this simple: this is a list of facts about recording video with the Panasonic Lumix GH1 (Japanese version) that are not immediately obvious and usually not covered by the professional reviews.
- Battery life is 163 minutes while recording AVCHD video (1280x720, 60p, EVF only, continuous auto-focus, Intelligent Auto Mode), with 162 minutes of total video recorded (across 3 memory cards). Panasonic’s video recording battery life estimate was 120 minutes. I had some technical difficulties beforehand, which meant I did not start recording on a completely full battery (I probably used up several minutes of recording time), and I also turned off the camera twice to switch between full memory cards (a 16GB and a 2GB), so you could probably squeeze out even more video with a bigger card (32GB or more) and fuller battery.
- AVCHD is free from the 4GB FAT32 single-file limit. When your recording goes over 4GB, the GH1 automatically starts recording to a new file, so your full recording can span several files. The recording only becomes one single file when it is imported into a computer and combined by the computer’s software. Therefore, recordings are only limited by the capacity of the memory card (except for the European version of the GH1, which is purposely limited).
- Importing/converting AVCHD is time- and space-consuming. All consumer-grade, and most pro-grade, video editing software require that AVCHD be imported to the computer and converted into a format that the software can edit. This can easily take twice the length of the recording and will result in uncompressed files that are MUCH larger than what was on the memory card. So even though you can take 4 full hours of 1920x1080 video on one 32GB card, you might not want to import what may be several hundred gigabytes of video.
Got any more questions about the GH1 or requests for tests? Ask away in the comments! (Please keep in mind that I am not a professional reviewer and do not have much to work with beyond the GH1 itself.)
