ARW to MTS Converter

Convert ARW to MTS Online

Wrap a Sony Alpha raw (.arw) photo into an .MTS clip — the camcorder spelling of an AVCHD transport stream, the format Sony's own Handycam and Panasonic HD camcorders record to. It is a fitting pairing: a Sony α still dropped into the Sony/Panasonic camcorder container, which is exactly what photographers do when they need to slot a frame into an older AVCHD editing or disc-authoring timeline that only ingests .mts footage. Know going in that this is not "opening a raw in a video editor": the converter renders your ARW to one still frame and holds that motionless frame on screen for a duration you set — a silent, static clip. If you just want a normal video or a viewable photo, ARW to MP4 and ARW to JPG are almost certainly what you actually want.

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 you can queue several frames at once.
2. Set Image Duration: Open the Image Duration control and pick how long the rendered frame is held — from 1/60 of a second up to 10 seconds per frame; the default is 5 seconds per frame. Use Merge strategy to choose "Merge images" (one combined clip) or "Video per image" (a separate .mts per photo).
3. Set Quality Preset, Video resolution, and Background Color: Leave Quality Preset on "Very High (Recommended)", set Video resolution to "Keep original" or a fixed 1920x1080 preset, and pick a Background Color (default Black) to pad any letterboxed area. Video Codec defaults to H.264 under Advanced Options, which is what AVCHD tools expect.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and save your silent .MTS clip. No sign-up, no watermark.

ARW vs MTS: What Goes In and What Comes Out

Frequently Asked Questions

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

Almost the only reason is an AVCHD-era pipeline — and the Sony-to-Sony fit is the nice part of it. If you are building a project in an older editor or disc-authoring tool that ingests .mts transport-stream footage and you need to drop in a still — a title card, a slate, an α photograph — an .MTS clip slots into that timeline without a re-wrap. For every other purpose, ARW to MP4 carries the same H.264 video in a smaller file that plays on phones, browsers, TVs, and ordinary editors. If you only want a viewable picture rather than a video at all, render ARW to JPG instead.

What happens to all the raw latitude in my ARW?

It is spent at the render step. To place an ARW into any video frame, the converter must demosaic the Sony sensor data and bake in a white balance, exposure, and any Creative Style — the way a raw developer applies them — because transport-stream video has no concept of undeveloped raw data. ARW is built on the TIFF/EP specification and holds 12-bit (early Alpha bodies) or 14-bit (most modern α models) of unprocessed sensor data; the frame inside the .MTS is a finished 8-bit video frame, so the recoverable highlights, shadows, and adjustable white balance of the raw are no longer freely editable in the clip. Develop the raw in a dedicated editor first if you want that control, and keep the original .arw as your master.

Will the MTS clip have any motion or sound?

No on both counts. The ARW is rendered to one still frame, and that single frame is held on screen for the duration you set — so it plays as a frozen clip with no pans, zooms, or transitions. It is also silent: a still image carries no audio track, so there is nothing to encode into the AVCHD stream, even though AVCHD itself supports Dolby AC-3 and linear PCM audio. If you upload several ARWs and choose "Merge images" under Merge strategy, they join back to back — each shown in turn for its set duration — which is a sequence of stills, not a cross-faded slideshow. Add narration or music on the editing timeline after you import the clip.

My α is 24 megapixels — what resolution does the MTS clip end up?

Lower than the raw, in practice. Sony Alpha bodies in the roughly 24-to-61-megapixel class capture far more pixels than a video frame holds, so leaving Video resolution on "Keep original" still produces a video-sized frame rather than a poster-sized one, and choosing a 1920x1080 preset downscales the rendered image to fit 1080p. The detail that does not fit the chosen frame is discarded — that is normal for putting a high-resolution photo into video. If preserving every pixel matters, keep the still as an image with ARW to JPG or a lossless ARW to TIFF rather than wrapping it in video.

Is MTS the same as M2TS, and which one do I get?

.MTS and .m2ts are the same BDAV MPEG transport stream. AVCHD camcorders write the file as .MTS, and the identical stream is referred to as .m2ts once it lands on a computer or a Blu-ray disc — you can rename one to the other without re-encoding. This tool outputs the .MTS spelling for AVCHD-era editors and authoring templates that specifically expect that extension. For an .mts from any image format, not just Sony raw, see Image to MTS.

How are my files handled, and how long are they kept?

Your ARW is uploaded over an encrypted connection, rendered and wrapped into an .MTS clip on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours after conversion — no sign-up, no watermark, and your photos are never shared or made public. In our testing, a 24-megapixel ARW rendered into a 1080p .MTS held for five seconds produced a small clip, since one static frame compresses efficiently in H.264; the main practical limit on a big job is upload size and time, since Sony raws often run tens of megabytes each.