ARW to MTS Converter

Dropping a Sony Raw Into an AVCHD Timeline: What This Tutorial Covers

.MTS is the file a Sony Handycam or Panasonic HD camcorder writes: an AVCHD clip, carried in an MPEG-2 transport stream. This tutorial is for the person who has a Sony Alpha raw photograph and an editing or disc-authoring project that only ingests .mts footage — a title card, a slate, a still to cut between shots. What you get is not "a raw opened in a video editor": the converter renders the .arw to one frame and holds that motionless frame on screen for a duration you choose, silently. Everything below is about making that clip land cleanly in an AVCHD-era workflow, and about the cases where ARW to MP4 or ARW to JPG is the file you actually wanted.

How to Convert ARW to MTS

1. Upload Your ARW File: Drag and drop your Sony .arw onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse — straight off an α7, α6000-series, or older DSLR-A body, and several frames can be queued at once.
2. Set Merge Strategy and Image Duration: "Merge strategy" chooses "Merge images" (all uploads become one clip) or "Video per image" (one .mts each). "Image Duration" runs from a single frame at 60fps up to 10 seconds per frame, with 5 seconds per frame pre-selected.
3. Leave Video Codec on H.264 and Check Resolution: "Video Codec" is pre-set to H.264, which is what AVCHD tools expect; DivX, H.265, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and Xvid are also listed. "Quality Preset" sits at Very High (Recommended), "Video resolution" can stay on "Keep original" or take a fixed 1920 x 1080, and "Background Color" (White by default) pads any letterbox area.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .MTS. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are processed on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

Walk-through: Duration, Codec, and Frame Size

Three decisions determine whether the clip drops straight onto your timeline or fights you.

• Duration: pick something you can trim rather than something you will have to extend. Five seconds is the pre-selected value and works as a hold frame; ten seconds gives an editor room to cut. If you want a genuine single frame to freeze later, the dropdown's 1/60s, 1/30s, and 1/24s entries produce exactly that.
• Codec: AVCHD is defined around MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, so H.264 is both the pre-selected value and the one your camcorder software expects. The page will let you put MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Xvid, DivX, or H.265 inside the .mts wrapper, and a strict AVCHD ingest will usually reject those even though a desktop player opens them happily.
• Frame size: a 24- to 61-megapixel Sony frame is far larger than any AVCHD video frame, so it is being scaled down regardless. Choosing the fixed 1920 x 1080 preset makes that explicit and matches what the rest of an AVCHD project is running at.
• Background colour: the padding colour matters more than it sounds. A 3:2 photograph in a 16:9 frame leaves bars on two sides; white (the default) suits a bright edit, while black or a brand colour suits a dark one.

ARW vs MTS: What Goes In and What Comes Out

MTS and AVCHD at a Glance

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "My editor rejects the clip even though VLC plays it." Usually the codec. AVCHD ingest expects H.264; if you switched Video Codec to MPEG-2, Xvid, DivX, or H.265, convert again on the default.
• "The clip is silent." Expected, and not fixable at this step: a photograph has no audio track to carry, so the transport stream contains video only. Lay music or narration over it on the timeline.
• "There are white bars down the sides." Your 3:2 photo does not fill the 16:9 video frame; the difference is padded with the Background Color. Change that colour, or crop the photo to 16:9 before converting.
• "The image looks softer than the photograph." A 24-megapixel frame scaled to 1080p keeps roughly two megapixels of it. That is inherent, not a quality setting — though leaving Quality Preset at Very High avoids adding compression softness on top.
• "The colours are not my edit." The raw is rendered with a neutral default. A Creative Look or picture profile is a Sony in-body instruction that a third-party renderer does not reproduce, so develop the raw and export a finished image first if the look matters.
• "The upload is the slow part." It usually is. Raws run tens of megabytes each while the resulting clip is small, so convert in modest batches rather than one long queue.

When This Doesn't Work

If nothing downstream specifically demands .mts, this is the wrong target. The same H.264 frame in an MP4 plays on phones, browsers, TVs, and every modern editor, so ARW to MP4 is the safer clip. If you want the photograph rather than a clip, ARW to JPG gives you a universal image and ARW to TIFF a lossless editing master. And if your project actually wants the computer-side .m2ts spelling, use ARW to M2TS rather than renaming files by hand — the two extensions are packetized differently, so a rename relabels the file without re-framing it. There is no motion hidden inside an ARW to recover — the file is one frame, and this page's only job is to wrap that frame in a transport stream.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why would I convert an ARW photo to MTS instead of MP4?

Because something in an AVCHD-era pipeline insists on it. If you are cutting in an older editor or authoring a disc from .mts footage and you need to drop in a still — a title card, a slate, an α photograph — an .MTS clip joins that timeline without a re-wrap. There is a pleasing symmetry to it too, since AVCHD is a Sony and Panasonic format and the raw came off a Sony body. For any other purpose MP4 carries the same H.264 video in a file that plays nearly everywhere.

Will the MTS clip have any motion or sound?

Neither. The raw is rendered to one frame and that frame is held for the duration you set, so it plays as a freeze — no pan, no zoom, no transitions. It is silent because a still image has no audio track to carry, which is also why the Audio Codec menu never appears for image sources, even though AVCHD itself specifies Dolby Digital (AC-3) and linear PCM audio. Merging several ARWs joins them back to back, each shown in turn; that is a sequence of stills, not a cross-faded slideshow.

Is MTS the same as M2TS, and which one should I generate?

They carry the same encoded video in differently framed transport streams. AVCHD camcorders use the .MTS spelling on their own media, while computers and Blu-ray discs use .m2ts, and the extension decides the packets: this page writes .MTS as a plain stream of 188-byte packets beginning with the 0x47 sync byte, while ARW to M2TS writes BDAV 192-byte packets that each prefix a 4-byte timestamp header and come out slightly larger. Generate whichever your software asks for rather than renaming the download, since a rename relabels the file without re-framing it. For an .mts from image formats other than Sony raw, use Image to MTS.

What happens to all the raw latitude in my ARW?

It is spent at the render step. Transport-stream video has no concept of undeveloped sensor data, so the converter must demosaic the raw and bake in a white balance, exposure, and tone curve before anything can be encoded. ARW holds roughly 12-bit data on early Alpha bodies and 14-bit on most modern α models; what lands inside the .MTS is a finished 8-bit frame with no recoverable highlights or adjustable white balance. Develop the raw in a dedicated editor first if you want that control, and keep the .arw as the master.

My camera is 24 megapixels — what resolution does the clip end up at?

Far lower, and unavoidably so. AVCHD video frames top out around 1920 x 1080 in the era this format belongs to, while a 24- to 61-megapixel photograph is many times that, so the frame is scaled down and the surplus detail is discarded. Choosing the fixed 1920 x 1080 preset simply makes that explicit and matches the rest of an AVCHD project. If preserving every pixel matters, keep the picture as a picture with ARW to JPG or ARW to TIFF.

Which video codec should I leave selected?

H.264, which is what the page pre-selects. AVCHD is built on MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, so camcorder software, AVCHD-aware editors, and disc-authoring tools all expect that codec inside the transport stream. The dropdown also offers DivX, H.265, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and Xvid; those will produce a playable file for desktop players, but a strict AVCHD ingest is entitled to refuse them, and troubleshooting that is rarely worth the trouble.

Can I turn a set of ARW files into one continuous MTS?

Yes. Upload them all, leave "Merge strategy" on "Merge images", and each photograph is shown for the Image Duration in upload order, producing one clip whose length is the duration multiplied by the file count. Choose "Video per image" if you would rather have one .mts per photograph — which is often more useful in an edit, since each still can then be trimmed and placed independently.

What happens to my ARW file after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, rendered and packaged into the transport stream on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours later — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public. Only the clip you download persists. A single static H.264 frame compresses efficiently, so the .MTS is usually small compared with the raw that produced it, and the transfer rather than the encode is what you will spend your time waiting on.