Playing MOD files on Mac ???

I know that this is a little late but... VLC will allow you to play the .MOD files without the need to convert. Now to get the .MOD into iMovie, well good luck you have to convert them first, yeah unless you have found away in which case please share. Now iMovie may import them if you connect your camera directly to computer. But if you have saved them to a disk for backup and try to import into iMovie it will not work.

I've used the following method with great success in iMovie '08 and it should work in '09 as well (this was with files of a Panasonic camcorder that iMovie does not recognize):

1) Create a root folder called Mp_Root on an external drive, USB stick, SD card... (probably works with a disk image as well, though I haven't tried it)

2) Inside this folder create another folder called 101PNV01

3) Copy your .mod files inside the 101PNV01 folder and change the extensions to .mpg

4) Restart iMovie. It will now detect the external drive as a camera and allow to import all the clips using the date created/modified info as timestamps for perfect cataloguing.

iMovie does NOT re-encode the movie files, you retain full quality. It simply puts them in a .mov container and creates the thumbnails.

I was going to try something like this in a few days. That sound really interesting, I think I like that will try tomorrow.

Ok i couldn't stand it I had to try it. And violfrickinla that is awesome. That totally worked in iMovie 08 I will try on my wife's iMovie 09. I have been trying for a year dud. You are awesome I don't know if you came up with this on your own, don't care! Thanks for sharing. I think I will treat my self to an ice cream and then maybe a nice cold longneck..................................................... Ok so I am very impatient I now have my cold longneck which is tasty, and yes it works on my wife's iMovie09. Now if I could figure out a way to get these unconverted files into Premiere Pro... Valenciano, I'm listening!

I learned about this trick on these boards myself. This was the original thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1122836&tstart=0#5323948

Btw, if you have a lot of files to import you can speed up on changing the extensions by using an automator action like this one:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/changeextensions.html

Don't know about Premiere Pro though. Never used it, sorry.

My hat is off to you.

I had been looking for a solution like this for a long time. Thanks!

I had been using MPEG Streamclip. While it works quite nicely, it adds a lot of extra time to your projects while you convert files and the new files take far more hard disk space than your originals.

Too bad these fora don't provide for a way to rate answers. Valenciano deserves five stars.

WOW you are the man!! I cant believed that worked. Today is my birthday and thats the best gift I got....LOL

Ronnie

Valenciano is a genius. Really helpful.