Useful Tips for Camcorder Video Formats

Nowadays, more and more people tend to enjoy publishing movies by themselves. Most of them prefer to use some kinds of professional camcorders to shoot videos, and after that, they would adjust the videos or edit the videos with some video editing programs like FCP, iMovie, Sony Vegas, Windows Movie Maker and so on in most situations. However, some of my friends told me that they have met some problems while editing their videos since the format compatibility problems. So, they asked me to give them some explanation about the camcorder video formats and advices on how to make the camcorder videos be supported by the mainstream video editors/applications/mobile devices.

OK, firstly, you should remember that the camcorder footages are mostly encoded with AVCHD MTS/AVCHD Lite, or sometimes MXF format. What exactly these formats are? Let's take a look at them:

MTS:
High-definition MPEG Transport Stream video format commonly called "AVCHD"; AVCHD stands for "Advanced Video Codec High Definition used by Sony, Panasonic, and other HD camcorders; based on the MPEG-2 transport stream and supports 720p and 1080i HD video formats.

AVCHD Lite:
AVCHD Lite identifies a subset of AVCHD format, in which progressive-scan video is limited to 720p (1280x720 resolution) Announced in January 2009, the Panasonic DMC-ZS3/DMC-FT1/DMC-TZ7 digital cameras were the first digital cameras to offer AVCHD-lite movie mode. In these early models, the sensor was limited to 25fps (PAL)/30fps(NTSC), which was then recorded in a AVCHD 720p50/60 format bitstream (using picture flags to instruct the decoder to display each stored frame twice.) Since then, Panasonic has added AVCHD-lite to more of its camcorders and digital cameras. In newer models such as the DMC FZ-200, the sensor captures a full 50fps/60fps for video recording.

MXF:
Multimedia format used by digital audio and video programs; contains captured audio and video data as well as metadata that describes the media stored in the file; designed by Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) as a standard container for audio and video data; can be converted into other formats, such as .AVI or .MOV.

As to the supported video formats of the popular editors, it depends on what OS they run on, either Mac, or Windows. For Windows-based programs, they always support AVI, WMV and MPG formats, while the Mac ones, they mostly support MOV files. When it comes to the mobile devices-friendly formats, it would be much simpler – most of the mobile devices support MP4 format (sometimes only support).

Now you may find that the camcorder video formats are special, and will not be recognized by most devices/applications. Therefore, if you want to import footages from such as Panasonic Lumix FZ45 AVCHD Lite or Panasonic P2 MXF to the editors like FCP/iMovie for editing, you need to convert Panasonic Lumix FZ45 AVCHD Lite to MOV or Panasonic P2 MXF to MOV via a professional Mac AVCHD Converter/Mac MXF Converter. For Windows users, you should choose the Windows Version.

After the conversion, you can then easily edit the camcorder videos in FCP/iMovie, etc. Moreover, you can also you this powerful converting tool to convert videos to mobile devices like converting MTS to Nexus 10 and M4V to Galaxy S4 and so on.


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Keywords: Panasonic Lumix FZ45 AVCHD Lite to MOV, Mac AVCHD Converter, Mac MXF Converter

By: cindyhuan

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