Does iMovie 11 support native AVCHD (.mts) files?

I'm wondering this too. Can anyone help us?

The product isn't 'in our hands' yet - and we aren't supposed to speculate - but ...

I saw nothing in the web broadcast or the iMovie '11 product description that suggests it supports AVCHD in other that the current way.

We will have to wait until the product is in users hands (I ordered mine right after the broadcast) to see what the actual situation is.

I am fairly sure that this would have been announced as a feature if it were included.

The lack of native AVCHD editing is why I do my video editing exclusively on a PC, where there are a range of very good options that allow this.

That said, I would move back to iMovie in a heart beat for its greater ease of use if it had this feature.

I guess we should keep our fingers crossed for iMovie 12.

I don't think it does. I picked up a copy this afternoon after the keynote (I like the way that Apple stores have them in stock right away - and at $49 it wasn't really a painful experiment) hoping this would be the case, but it does not appear to be so.

After installing, I tried to import some loose .mts files, but they are greyed out. Some brief exploring turned up nothing to help.

This is really too bad. It would be so nice to be able to save the individual .mts file on my hard drive, and access them when necessary. I'm fine with the intermediate encoding iMovie does before editing, but forcing me to use the silly file structure of my camera's hard drive, or an iMovie archive (basically the same thing) is frustrating.

Allowing the import of naked .mts files would be a huge step forward.

Assuming I'm not wrong about this, what is the best way to work around this? What is the best way to bring loose .mts files into iMovie? (And I hope I'm not hijacking the thread by asking this.)

What a tremendous disappointment. Support for different HD formats was all I wanted from iMovie 11. Unless I am mistaken (definitely a possibility), iMovie won't work smoothly with a whole host of modern HD camcorders. Surely that is more important that making trailers, for goodness sake.

Hi juneinny,

What PC program in particular would you recommend?

Hi bombass,

Here is is my 2 cents worth:

I have recently been trialling the following:
- Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum
- Pinnacle Studio 14
- Cyberlink PowerDirector 8
- Premiere Elements 9

I liked the ease of use of Pinnacle Studio the most. However, when I exported to H.264 with MPEG -2TS, I had a play back issue. When I viewed the footage on my computer and dragged the slider bar forward or backwards to fast forward or rewind the footage would remain pixelated for about 10 seconds before it corrected itself. No other programs caused this.

So I would have to say my favorite is Cyberlink PowerDirector 8 - although I believe a new version will be released soon. Perhaps you could download the trial version.

My next favorite was Premiere Elements 9. However, I found the interface a bit slow and clunky.

Unfortunately, my computer had issues handling the demands of Sony Vegas because of the way it previews the video.

Thanks for the response, Casho3. I've used Pinnacle, but I'm not sure what version. It was kind of awkward to import the .mts files. That's all I want! The basic editing features of all of these programs are just fine for me. It's the method of getting the AVCHD files imported that bugs me. I'll give PowerDirector a try.

Sorry to hijack the thread. I just really dislike the way iMovie imports the AVCHD video files. I have no problem with the fact that it can't natively edit AVCHD - using the Apple Intermediate codec is fine by me. But forcing me to keep around hard drive archives is really clunky. If I could simply import the .mts file, I could keep only the scenes which matter. Keeping the entire camcorder hard drive structure seems bizarre.

That's the end of my rant. Sorry everyone!

In that case, you could use a third party import tool called VoltaicHD.

http://www.shedworx.com/node/107

They have a free trial.

I tried Voltaic once, and I had some trouble understanding the settings. Does it default to the same kind of conversion that iMovie does?

I'll give it a try again. Thanks for the suggestion. Are there any other programs anyone would recommend for conversion?

Voltaic does default to Apple Intermediate, but has the ability to transcode to other codecs if preferred (eg ProRes). I find it fine for small clips (say, 5 mins or less), but it only uses 1 core at the moment so it's not as fast as a log/transfer in iMovie or FCP.

Matt

I just played around with the demo of Voltaic, and the video conversion looks good. But it uses the date of the conversion for the clip, and not the date that the clip was recorded. That's not great... or am I missing something?

Whoops, just figured it out myself. Not bad! Voltaic could be a nice workaround.