Backing up raw AVCHD video from SDHC cards to disk image

I’ve recently purchased a Panasonic SD-100 HD video camera that records onto SDHC cards, there are plenty of reviews of it around the web, so I won’t repeat what they have to say but it really is a superb HD video camera, small, lightweight, good battery life and the picture quality far exceeds my expectations.

I have 2x4GB SDHC cards which each hold around 40mins on the highest quality setting, when they get full I normally just open iMovie 08 and import all the footage before wiping the card. The problem is, I sometimes do this on my MacBook Air and was shocked to find a warning saying I was low on disk space on the Air. I had 10GB free before I started importing 4GB of video but I didn’t realise that iMovie 08 un-packs all the video from the video camera’s compressed format so the 4GB ends up being ~16GB+. Importing the video on my MacBook Air is also quite a slow process, on my Mac Pro it’s not too slow but I needed a solution to copying the card contents whilst on the road in order to free up the space on the card.

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