Need advice about AVCHD conversion programs for the Mac OS 10.5
 

I have been experimenting with AVCHD and am wondering what sort of success people have had with the various ingest options out there.

I have a three year old MacBook Pro and the only success I've had has been with iMovie9 or MPEG Streamclip. The other programs which I can download demos, Cineform NeoHD or Voltaic, crash on my completely updated computer.

So far iMovie9 is the most cooperative with the AVCHD files but I rather work with FCP. Is there an efficient way to use iMovie to capture AVCHD and export FCP ready files?

MPEGStreamclip makes edit ready files but it might not be giving me the best results. My experience with HDV and MPEGStreamclip shows that it's not the best program with that type of codec.

Thanks for helping.

If you have FCP 6 it's as easy as using the log and transfer feature to turn the AVCHD clips into ProRes422 Quicktime files.

It's one of the methods I tried and got nowhere. Log and Transfer wouldn't recognize the files off the AIPTEK camera I have. Interestingly, I can import the files directly into FCP and it recognizes them but they always need rendering. Not the easiest way to work. FCP will change the sequence settings to H.264 if I let it.

What's the extension of the file?

.mov, believe it or not.

Looks as though you're dealing with a quicktime file with mpeg4 compression rather than an actual mpeg4 AVCHD file. The extension would be MTS or some other transport stream mpeg derivative.

Toast 9 or 10 will convert your .mts files to any codec you have available on your Mac. I like it better than Log and Transfer personally.

As John mentioned if your seeing a .mov extension, then you are seeing a mpeg4 file.