Just bought a GZ-HD300 and can't open/view any footage on my 2008 MacBookPro. I connect the camera via USB cable, and the camera appears in Finder, and I can browse through files--it appears my (test) footage are files ".mts" but I can't open them using FCP7; iMovie; MPEG Streamclip...

JVC's site says I don't need to download any software...but then how do I view and use my footage?? I even tried renaming the file extension from .mts to .mov--cheeky I know and predictably useless.

Help!

For the record, if you're reading this thread then this might help explain things! This is where I got to:

The AVCHD codec is highly compressed, and is difficult to playback (whether on a mac or PC). The only app (of which I'm aware--although MPEG Streamclip might work) that can playback footage shot in AVCHD is VLC player (in order to view your footage otherwise, it must be transcoded into another codec, eg prores, which takes time and disk space). Be aware however, that the playback is very chunky, and depending on your processing power, may not even enable motion , although the audio is OK. So you can use VLC as a quick and dirty preview device. Unfortunately, and this is very annoying, VLC won't show the length of clips (at least of .MTS files). To determine how long a clip is, you have to do the maths based on the bit rate of the recording.

FWIT...