Convert Panasonic HDC SD99 1080/50p AVCHD to AIC for Editing in iMovie

As European people (German, to be more specific), my wife and I always wanted to visit America some day(forgive me, but that's true). Last year we finally got a long vacation and went to the West Coast of USA for 3 weeks. We've visited California coast lines, The Sierra Nevada Mountain as well as amazing cities including Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was an extraordinary experience, full of fun and excitement although time is quite limited to cover all the sceneries of West Coast.

Before we started the trip, I've bought a Panasonic camcorder (Panasonic HDC SD99) to record videos. I'm a novice to camcorder or video stuff, so I read through the manual of Panasonic SD99 before I started to use it. According to the manual, 28Mbps shooting mode will produce best video quality (1080/50p AVCHD format) so I used this recording mode to record videos during our trip. The videos look remarkable in camcorder and quality is real full definition experience, very sharp and vivid.

After we came back from holiday, I wanted to make some basic editing in iMovie and then burn the videos to a DVD or better a Blu-ray disc. It was not until then that I realized that all my videos were not recognizable by iMovie 11. I immediately contacted Panasonic for help and was told that I contacted Apple for help about iMovie issue. But when I turned to Apple, I was thrown back to Panasonic and was suggested that I consulted Panasonic for dealing those cumbersome video clips on my camcorder. Then rep at Panasonic told me I may need third party software to handle 1080/50p AVCHD videos recorded by my Panasonic HDC SD99 but she refused to give me any information or recommendation about any third party software.

So finally I turned to my best advisor on net - Google, searched "put Panasonic videos in iMovie" and found lots of video conversion software which claims that they can handle AVCHD videos recorded by Panasonic camcorders. I tried several of them but not really satisfied for one reason for another. Some product took way too long to convert 3 single AVCHD videos to mov format(4 hours to convert 200MB files! But I have altogether over 10GB AVCHD files), other generated videos with rather poor quality which defeats my initial purpose of recording in highest quality mode of SD99. Before I got really frustrated and gave up, I tried out Aunsoft Video Converter for Mac and was so happy to find their specialized options for Mac users, including Apple ProRes codecs for FCP users and Apple Intermediate Codec for iMovie editing.

The whole experience afterwards was all smooth. With the help of Aunsoft Video Converter for Mac, I was able to combine all my mts video clips into one single file, at the same time, converted files to Apple Intermediate Codec for further editing in iMovie.



The conversion was super fast compared to its competitors and output MOV video gave impressive quality when imported to iMovie, almost same to the original quality to my naked eye. After editing in iMovie, I streamed the movie to my WDTV HD in Living room and watched it with my family members.

Ok, this is the end of my rattling and I hope to some extent it's helpful for people out there who have similar problems with me when you get a HD camcorder generating strange high definition videos and a Mac machine that can not handle them. :)

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