What is AVCHD Lite? How to play AVCHD Lite video on Mac?
AVCHD Lite is a subset of AVCHD format, which identifies devices that are capable of 720p/30fps recording only. Comparing with Full HD, the 720p/30fps video is recorded in the normal AVCHD 720p/60 format, but every other frame is duplicated, resulting in thirty actual frames per second. A good news for Mac guys is that Apple has made it clear that iMovie 09’ is able to edit the AVCHD Lite video. Yet the AVCHD Lite video turns out to be incompatible with QuickTime Player. Surely you may play it with Mplayer or VLC player, but guys like me would rather use QuickTime Player watching everything. In order to play the AVCHD Lite video files generated by the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FT1 smoothly on Mac, the AVCHD Lite must be converted to QuickTime compatible format, like MOV, MP4, etc.
In order to have the AVCHD Lite video files generated by the Panasonic Lumix Series like dmc-zs7,DMC-HF20, work with iMovie, Final Cut you can convert these footage to iMovie compatible formats like MOV or DV.
How to :
Step One. Free download, install and launch the PavtubeMac AVCHD Lite MTS Converter.
Once you run it, click “Add” to import the source AVCHD Lite MTS files.
Step Two. Select QuickTime (*.mov) as output format for iMovie/Final Cut .
Click on the drop-down list of “Format”, and follow “DV”; “Apple DV NTSC(*.dv)” or “Common Video”; “MOV-QuickTime (*.mov)”.
Step Three. Click “Settings” button to adjust video and audio parameters
Notice that which parameter to select has close relationship with the hardware configurations of your computer. For DV format, you may use default video and audio parameters, or adjust the Frame rate to 29.97, and bitrate higher for better quality, as it shows below:
If you would not like to degrade the AVCHD quality, you may retain the HD video quality by selecting “HD Video”> “H.264 HD Video (*.mov)” in Step 2 and then apply the following settings:
Video Codec H.264, Size: 1280*720p, Bitrate: 8000kbps, Frame Rate: 30/29.97,
Audio Codec: AAC, Sampling rate: 48khz, Bitrate: 320kbps, Channels: 6.
Step 4: Click “Convert” button to start converting AVCHD Lite to Mov iMovie compatible format.
After the above steps are done, you can click “Convert” button to start conversion.
And you can click “Open” button to get the generated files for iMovie. Afterwards, just import the output files to iMovie and Final Cut . Have fun.
How to convert MTS to MPEG-4 MP4 and H.264 MP4 formats
