Sony Motion Picture View and Macs?

[ChrisCraggs]

I have had my DSC-HX100V a few weeks now (great still shots) and have utterly failed to find away of getting the videos onto my Mac in a format I can watch, edit and convert. Motion Picture Viewer appears to be the key for looking at these .MTS files, but this doesn't work on a Mac.

VERY disappointed thus far. Anyone any ideas?

Chris Craggs

[blaireau_photo]

Hello Chris - welcome to the Sony Forums

Have you taken a look at the official support pages for this camera model. For Mac users in particular, there is a section about transferring videos using iMovie which can be viewed here:

http://support.sony-europe.com/tutorials/dime/imovietransfer/imovie.aspx?site=odw_en_GB&f=DSC&m=DSC-...

I hope this helps,

Simon

[ChrisCraggs]

Thanks for that. Still  no joy on reading the .MTS files. I can see the card and the files on it on my Mac but they are 'greyed, so I can't get at them.

I have half soved the problem by shooting in MP4 format, which I can play/edit etc via QuickTime though that isn't making th best use of the cameras HD abilities.

Any more ideas would be greatfully recieved.

Chris

[blaireau_photo]

Hello again

There has been some discussion online of the same problem and in particular, one thread on the official Apple forums may give some more helpful insight, albeit that the thread is a few years old:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1102115?start=0&tstart=0

Although I cannot guarantee that trying to 'mimic' the file structure will work, there are other mentions of using software like 'Voltaic' for file conversion.

Thanks,

Simon

[d20a6e66a0c12e49]

had the same problem but if you change the settings on your hx9 for video to mp4 1080 i beleve it drops the quality but i could not see the difference and now you mac will reconice this format and now you can edit it in imovie for such a camera on this setting the video is fantastic

[ChrisCraggs]

Thanks, I have gone with that solution which works well enough. It is a pity that I can't use/access one of the cameras' main selling points (HD Video) - this is my 1st Sony and although the camera is a fine piece of kit I am pretty unimpressed with this fiasco!

Thanks

Chris

[Mick2011]

Hey Chris, I noticed you wrote, "I can see the card and the files on it on my Mac but they are 'greyed, so I can't get at them"

You shouldn't need to directly view the greyed-out .mts files in order to get them into iMovie. Just launch iMovie and connect up your camera; click the camera icon in iMovie and either automatically or manually select the clips you want to view/edit.

This is the only way the mac is able to handle your files, as it has no truly native AVCHD support and won't read .mts files any other way. iMovie uses Quicktime to convert them on-the-fly to AIC format. The file decompression involved in this makes quite large files, so I'd suggest using iMovie on 'manual' until you get used to it.

On the issue of HD, the AIC conversion will slightly downsample your clips by default, although there are ways of making it work with HD. This Apple Support thread is rather long but well worth a read: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2620458?start=0&tstart=0

Incidentally, given the file sizes involved, I'd recommend using Disk Utility to make a Disk Image copy of your entire card, rather than store the uncompressed AIC files (see the end of that thread) and if you do wish to work with 1080p in iMovie, grab a big (2Tb+) external hard drive first.

Hope that's of some help

Mick

[ChrisCraggs]

Thanks for that. I am away from home at the moment and don't have a way of connecting the camera to the Mac. Sounds a goer, I'll try it when I get back home.

Cheers

Chris