If you are shooting with a Sony Alpha A5000 mirrorless camera, buthave not found a solution yet to import its AVCHD .m2ts clips to iMovie or FCP X for basic editing, this post may shed you some light on this.
“Can anyone assist me to import movie files from Sony Alpha A5000 mirrorless camera to iMovie please? I have not found a solution yet and I only have 2 days to deliver my material to my client. I did try downloading the program streamclip and it could not handle the file either. So far I have no way of getting the A5000 AVCHD video, which is stored as an .M2TS file into iMovie. Does anyone else have any possible solutions? Many thanks for your help in advance!”
According to Sony, the Alpha A5000 mirrorless camera is ‘the world’s lightest interchangeable lens camera’, which ‘Capture HD Movies in your choice of standard 60i or cinematic 24p frames per second, all at Full HD 1920×1080 resolution. The AVCHD codec delivers stunning Blu-ray picture quality while the PC-friendly MP4 codec lets you compress to smaller 1080/30p files for easier upload to the Internet’. If you are shootings with a Sony A5000 camera, you may have problems one or another while importing A5000 AVCHD footage to iMovie or FCP X for basic editing, that’s because the AVCHD is a highly compressed recording format, which is proper for capture and delivery, but not good for editing. In that case, you’d better convert Sony A5000 M2TS to AIC for iMovie, or transcode Sony A5000 AVCHD to ProRes for FCP X. If you decide to do format conversion, we would recommend Video Converter for Mac, which works excellently as a Sony A5000 AVCHD Converter for Apple.
Download a free trial of Video Converter for Mac
Import AVCHD movies from Sony A5000 to iMovie and FCP X
To be able to import AVCHD movie files from Sony A5000 to iMovie and FCP X, follow these steps:
1. Install and run Video Converter for Mac as a Sony A5000 AVCHD Converter for Mac. The main interface appears as below:
2. Click on ‘Add File’ to add your A5000 AVCHD M2TS footage to the program.
3. Choose output format for iMovie and FCP X
In order to create editable files for iMovie, from the Format bar, choose ‘Apple InterMediateCodec (AIC) (*.mov) as output format from ‘iMovie and Final Cut Express’ column. Note that the AIC codec is also accepted by Final Cut Express.
To be able to edit Sony A5000 media in FCP X or FCP version 6 and 7, from the Format bar, select ‘Apple ProRes 422 (*.mov)’ as output format.
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.
4. Click ‘Settings’ button and go to ‘Profile Settings’ window to custom video and audio settings. (for advanced users)
5. When ready, click ‘Convert’ to start transcoding Sony A5000 footage to AIC or ProRes – the best suited editing formats for using within Apple iMovie’8/9/11 or Final Cut Pro X/7/6.
6. When the conversion process is done, click on ‘Open Folder’ button to get the generated QuickTime files and open them in iMovie or FCP X for further editing.
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