Todays TTFN (Tech Tip for Nerds) is about working with MTS video files (aka AVCHD) files on a Mac. I’m not going to go into ridonkulous technical specs here. Skip if you’re not looking for technical info!

FUNNY STORY: So yesterday I was shooting a parody of the already-notorious Eric Dane / Rebecca Gayheart / Kari Ann Peniche sex video (SFW-ish version) (NSFW version) (and much like the real one, there is no sex involved, but lots of funny!). Today I have to edit the video in Final Cut Pro. But it’s .MTS files on a Sony AVCHD HDR-SR1 camera! Ohhh No0es!

PROBLEM: A Sony HDR-SR1 HD AVCHD Handycam full of video files using the MTS extension located in the folder at /(the camera)/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM sits on my desk. I need to get the video off of this camera and onto my Mac Pro computer so that I can edit it with Final Cut Pro 6.

Click “More” to read the various things I tried, and the solutions I found.

Step 1 – Just going For it: I dragged all the files onto my computer and double-clicked 00001.MTS. It opened with Toast Titanium 9′s “Toast Video Player”, surprisingly, and I was able to watch it, but Toast had no options for converting the video (other than maybe burning it to DVD, which I wasn’t interested in.) Toast 9 can indeed convert these files, check out this YouTube video! Toast 9 is VERY worth the money, by the way, if you do a lot of video work, whether for business or fun.

Step 2 – Video Converters: I tried to open one with the latest version of MPEG Streamclip, one of my favorite video tools. I vaguely remembered this working in the past, but this time it only opened the video file as what looked like a silent audio stream. Next I tried opening one with VLC Media Player, which hung up and then crashed. I read somewhere that these should have worked, but they just didn’t. A little Googling revealed that working this with FFMPEGX would be way complicated, so I didn’t even go there.

Step 3 – iMovie: I read somewhere that I could just pull the clips into iMovie and then I knew I could usually get them out from there into Final Cut Pro. iMovie HD could not even detect the camera. iMovie (the most recent version) saw the camera and five video files on it, but none of the 30 HD clips. Useless.

Step 4 – More Google: Googling “MTS video convert” and variations was fairly useless. Lots of spammy links to hokey looking software with a garish user interface touting itself as “free” but that actually cost $30. Actually, that’s very “me” – Garish user interface, touting myself as “free” but actually costing $30… anyway

SOLUTION #1 – The easiest solution, which only came up by Googling “AVCHD video Final Cut Pro” (and not MTS video final cut pro), was going into FCP, choosing FILE > Log and Transfer, and then when it auto-recognized the camera I could import the video. You can’t use the regular “Log and Capture”, or just drag the files from the camera’s hard drive into Final Cut Pro, though. Weird.

SOLUTION #2 – Adobe Media Encoder CS4 can work with the actual MTS format files directly, re-outputting them into whatever format you want. Supposedly Adobe Premiere can work with these files directly, but I don’t have it.

SOULUTION #3 – Roxio Toast 9 can convert MTS files to whatever you want. Drag and drop.