My parents have a digital camcorder. A week long vacation with said camcorder, my parents, and their only grandchild produces a fair amount of raw footage. Before we headed back home after the vacation I wisely snapped up all the footage from their camera hoping to eventually run it through iMovie.
Turns out their camcorder stores its clips in MTS/AVCHD format, and I didn’t grab all the fluff^Wnecessary files. As a result iMovie ‘11 cannot import the MTS video clips.
I spent the better part of last night trying to figure out how to convert the MTS into something iMovie would import. While there are commercial tools that appear to do what I needed, I was sure I could get the same result using freely available tools. And sure enough ffmpeg - the swiss army knife of open source video handling - gets the job done.
After reading a bunch of threads and forum posts I finally found these settings to convert from MTS to MOV files that I could import into iMovie ‘11 without significant loss of quality:
ffmpeg -i input.mts -b 185M output.mov
That -b flag took me forever to find and I finally spotted it in this thread.
I am not a video buff, so I am sure the above can be optimized, but it worked, and I am posting it here primarily so I know I can find it again.
i know a step by step guide on how to import MTS to imovie at bigasoft.com/articles/how-to-import-avchd-to-imovie.html
This guide is applied for:
Import AVCHD files in MTS to iMovie
Import AVCHD files in M2TS to iMovie
Import AVCHD files in MPG under MPEG-2 compression to iMovie
Import AVCHD files in MOV with MJPEG video format to iMovie
Import AVCHD files in DV to iMovie
Import AVCHD files in MOD to iMovie
Import AVCHD files in TOD to iMovie
Import 1080/60p video from Panasonic HDC-TM700 camcorder, Panasonic HDC-SD9/HDC-HS9, Panasonic AG-HMC150, Canon HF S21, Sony HDR-AX2000, Sony HXR-NX5U and more
Import AVCHD to iMovie for iPhone, iPhone 4, iMovie iPad, iMovie iPad 2, iMovie iPod touch
Import AVCHD to Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express