Panasonic Lumix GF1 Video Import

iMovie will only import directly from the camera. It can't open the files in any other way.

With an AVCHD camera, the normal workflow would have two steps.
1) Make an archive copy of the original AVCHD that preserves all the camera specific info. Then, you have an original copy of the contents of your camera that you can mount anytime as if it were a camera.
You must have the entire directory structure of the camera - even the empty folders. If you only have the mts files, you cannot open. iMovie makes it easy to create this archive copy on the import screen.

2) Then, you import the AVCHD files into iMovie. You can either import directly from the camera, or directly from an SDHC card, or you can import from the archive. When you do this, the highly compressed AVCHD is converted to Apple Intermediate Codec for editing.

Having said that, if all you have are the MTS files, you could convert them yourself with a third party tool like Voltaic HD. Voltaic is not free, but you might be able to get an evaluation copy.

Thanks for the detailed explanation! The AVCHD file format seems like a pain.

Not really. For me, the AVCHD format is a great format. The only real competitor is h.264, which is very similar to AVCHD. When you import h.264 in small dimensions, imovie can edit it natively. However, when you import in high definition 1920x1080, converting to Apple Intermediate Codec is generally recommended anyway. Some people will try to edit HD h.264 without converting, and they do not find out until they render whether it will work or not. When you convert to AIC up front, you take away the guesswork.

It sounds like the small camera files will be much larger when imported into iMovie when they are >converted. Do you have an idea how much larger the files will be?

If you convert 1920x1080 AVCHD to 1920x1080 AIC, the file size could be 10x bigger. If you import as 960x540, maybe 4x bigger. The good news is that hard drives art cheap these days. (about $.10 to $.15 per gigabyte).

The reason is that AVCHD (and h.264) uses GOP (group of pictures) compression. This means you have, say, one full frame of video for every 24 frames, say, of your movie. The rest of the frames are compressed, and contain information like: what has changed since the previous frame? what is the direction of motion?, what is figure and what is ground? etc.

When you convert to AIC, you convert each frame to a full frame of video. This makes it much less processor-intensive to edit. It makes effects like slow motion and fast motion possible.

I am also a bit confused about the import process. If you choose to make an archive with iMovie, is >the archive stored within iMovie or as a separate Finder file on disk? I am not sure why you would >want the archive other than it would have the metadata. Does the conversion to AIC format destroy >the metadata?

The archive is stored as a folder in the finder at a location that you specify. This can be your internal drive, but most of us would use an external drive for this.

The reason to keep it is that, in general, the best copy of a video is the first generation - which is the original data captured by your camera. The AIC is second generation. In theory, the AIC should be very high quality, because you are just resolving the partial frames into full frames. But it is still a compressed format. (totally uncompressed video takes about 500GB per hour of footage, and is not editable on consumer equipment. You need Final Cut Pro and a very fast RAID drive system to edit uncompressed)

Lets say in a few years, the technology improves. Or let's say you decide to upgrade to Final Cut Pro and use the ProRes422 codec. In theory, you would want to import the first generation AVCHD into ProRes422 rather than importing the 2nd generation AIC into ProRes 422.

Conversion to AIC does not destroy the metadata.

I am not seeing the Lumix in the [supported cameras list|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3290] so be sure to check with Panasonic.

Some still cameras will import, but the workflow is to go through iPhoto first. I have never heard of an AVCHD camera that had to go through iPhoto.

Panasonic has a good track record of supporting Apple products. I have a Panasonic. So I think your odds are good. However, since it is not on the list, be sure to do some digging