Apple Photos and XAVC S Videos

Photos (daft name! as videos can be used to), is a new product, but they be stripped so many features away that were used. Numerous Mac users would have used iPhoto and now been almost forced to use Photos and not just lost features, but confusion because of this. As i know, photos support mp4 and mov videos, If you want to import xavc s to photos app, conversion is necessary, and this page talks about import xavc s to photos , hope it helps.

What format is it changed to?

It's quite possible that the resolution is not as good as the original but hard to say by how much. You'd have to be the judge of that.

A workaround would be to download the video files to a folder on the Desktop using Image Capture. Move that folder into the Movies folder and import into iMovie which should handle the format without conversion. You'd have to test that with one of the original files to make sure they don't get converted.

I tried using the XAVC S format on my Sony RX100 III today and noticed a few things that I hope might help you:

1) Apple Photos didn't recognize the videos at first on the SD card, but I was able to manually import them to the app. I simply opened the SD card on Finder, went to private/M4ROOT/CLIP/, found there all the individual XAVC S clips that I had recorded and dragged them on top of Photos. Photos imported them without a glitch.

2) There didn't seem to be any conversion during the import process. Also, the files have retained their original size. So I'm guessing these are the original files in all their glory. They play on photos and retained the date metadata correctly.

3) They also seem to be uploading to iCloud Photos, so hopefully this will all work out.

Good luck!

There is No need to create and spread incorrect information and intentionally create confusion

1 - no one have ever been forced to use photos or any other Mac software - iPhoto still works just fine with the latest OS and will forever unless you upgrade to some future incompatible OS some day

2 - use of Photos is totally optional, you can use any software you want - lots of people use LightRoom, open source software and others packages - no one is forced to do anything

3 - Photos has never lost any features - it is a totally new program and each new release has added features, none have ever been removed

4 - overall Photos is far superior to iPhoto in nearly every way - it is different, have different work flows and requires learning but is much better once you learn how to use it (which you have to do with any new software package you use - Photos is much easier to learn that Lightroom for example)

LN

You might post these questions in the iMovie forum where they would be more familiar with difference codecs than here.