DISQUS

Ben Galbraith's Blog: Official AVCHD Support in iMovie?

  • Andrew O'Donald · 2 years ago
    I'm very curious about your progress with the HDR UX1. I got mine around Christmas time and have been filling miniDVDs with AVCHD content for the whole year. I bought iLife '08 but have been unable to get my Mac to mount the camera. About the best I can get is to finalize a miniDVD and connect the camera via the USB. Then the miniDVD shows up with a root folder called BDMV. Inside that are six folders/files; BACKUP, CLIPINF, index.bdmv, MovieObject.bdmv, PLAYLIST, STREAM. Inside each is various files. I think the actual video is in stream and the files have the .m2ts suffix. I can't get these files to open in iMovie, QT7Pro, VLC player. I have several codec packages like Perian installed, but to no avail.

    Anyway I'm very interested in your discoveries in this area.

    Thanks, keep posting,
    AO
  • Ben parker · 2 years ago
    And how much it will cost?
  • Sean Tierney · 2 years ago
    Ben- did this work for you? I'm in the same boat w/ my sony HDR-SR1 camera in that I can't bring the footage into iMovie. Wondering if iLife '08 did in fact this for you...

    sean
  • Ben, NJ · 2 years ago
    I'm interested to hear, too. I understood it doesn't edit AVCHD natively, it converts it into a format that iMovie can use. The output isn't HD though, I would guess? Right?

    I hear Final Cut 4 DOES allow AVCHD editing, though. But I've never been able to figure out how to get started on FC. Can anyone recommend a good how-to-get-started tutorial??

    If anyone wants a cool Mac utility check out VisualHub - it allows conversion between multiple different video format (not AVCHD though). It's about $20 to download and is excellent. I use it with my UX1to convert the VOB files into DV and it works perfectly, every time. http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/