We have a video camera (Panasonic HDC-SD5) shooting in Full HD resolution, which is more of a down payment towards a future home entertainment system than anything we can really use right now (nothing in the house can play back at a 1920x1080 resolution). So for now I am just left with these huge files that take up lots of disk space to store and ages of CPU cycles to process.

The camera records in AVCHD, which is a highly compressed format that still takes about 1GB per 10 minutes. Things get worse when importing them into iMovie, because iMovie insists to decompress the files, resulting in 1GB per minute, and the decompression is painfully CPU-intensive, running at about real-time. I want to store the movies exclusively in their native AVCHD until I feel like actually editing them, but there seems to be no viewer application for that format (which is weird, as iMovie's import wizard can preview them). At least I can copy them off the camera onto the hard disk to free up the memory card.