Came upon issues importing and editing AVCHD video from Canon XA10 in iMovie? If so, you may wish to read this post. It displays a workaround to transcode XA10 AVCHD video to iMovie friendly format for editing directly and smoothly.
The Canon XA10 HD Professional Camcorder is a fully featured, ultra-compact pro video camera that shares nearly all the functionality of the XF100, but in an even smaller, run-and-gun form factor. The XA10 utilizes MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 compression technology and records Full HD 1080p AVCHD footage in an MTS wrapper at bitrates up to 24Mbps. The XA10’s native 1920 x 1080 CMOS sensor also lets you choose 60i, 24p, PF30, and PF24 frame rates for customizing the look of your footage.
If you copy the XA10 AVCHD folder onto a hard drive intact, you can then import it into iMovie. The advantage of this approach gives you a backup of the AVCHD files. Please remember that don’t mess with the files within the AVCHD folder, just copy the whole folder. If for what ever reason you dig into the folder only with separate MTS clips maintained, iMovie will do nothing with XA10 mts files. In that case, you will need third party software to convert them first. Read on to find a step-by-step guide on how to convert Canon XA10 AVCHD MTS files to AIC .mov for iMovie editing.
Here’s what you need
HD Video Converter for Mac
[Guide] How to convert Canon XA10 AVCHD MTS to QuickTime movie format for editing in iMovie?
To do this:
Step 1: Open up HD Video Converter for Mac as a Canon XA10 AVCHD Converter for iMovie. When its main interface comes up, click ‘Add File’ to load your source media.
Step 2: Select output format for your editing program
To convert Canon XA10 AVCHD MTS for iMovie, from ‘Profile’ list, choose ‘Apple InterMediate Codec (AIC)(*.mov)’ as output format under ‘iMovie and Final Cut Express’ column.
Important: If you’ve loaded a number of video clips to do batch conversion, please do remember ticking off ‘Apply to All’ option before you start.
Step 3: Custom video and audio settings (optional)
If necessary, you can click ‘Settings’ button and go to ‘Profiles Settings’ panel to modify video and audio settings like video encoder, resolution, video bit rate, frame rate, aspect ratio, audio encoder, sample rate, audio bit rate, and audio channels. 3D settings are also available.
Step 4: Begin Canon XA10 AVCHD MTS to MOV Conversion on Mac
When ready, click ‘Convert’ to start format conversion. Once the conversion process is complete, you can click ‘Open Folder’ button to get the generated AIC MOV files for editing in iMovie with optimum performance.
Tips:
If you don’t want to wait for the entire conversion process, you can tick off ‘Showdown computer when conversion completed’ and go away to do other things.
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