CR3 to MTS Converter

Convert CR3 to MTS: What This Tutorial Covers

This page walks through turning a Canon .CR3 raw photo into an .MTS clip — the camcorder spelling of an AVCHD transport stream — and, just as importantly, what that clip will and will not be. Before you run it, know that this is not "opening a raw in a video editor": the converter renders your CR3 to a single still frame and wraps that one motionless frame in an AVCHD-style stream, so the result is a silent, static clip held on screen for a duration you choose. The honest reason to make one is to drop a still into an AVCHD-era editing or disc-authoring timeline that only ingests .mts footage. If you just want a picture or a normal modern video, the two escape hatches at the end of this tutorial — CR3 to JPG and CR3 to MP4 — are almost certainly what you actually want.

How to Convert CR3 to MTS

1. Upload Your CR3 File: Drag and drop your .cr3 onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse — EOS R-series and EOS M50 captures, lossless or lossy C-RAW, all work, and you can queue several 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 pick "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 preset, and choose 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.

Walk-through: Choosing Duration, Resolution, and Codec

The three settings that decide what your clip looks like are duration, resolution, and codec — and for a still-into-AVCHD job the right answers are narrower than the menus suggest.

• If you want a slate or title card that sits on screen for a few seconds, leave Image Duration at 5 seconds per frame, or raise it toward 10; a single CR3 then plays as one held frame for that whole time.
• If you are assembling several stills into one .mts, set Merge strategy to "Merge images" and give each a duration — they play back to back, each shown for its set time. That is a sequence of stills, not a cross-faded slideshow.
• If your AVCHD editor expects 1080p footage, set Video resolution to a fixed 1920x1080 preset so the rendered photo is fitted into a standard AVCHD frame rather than an over-large one. "Keep original" still produces a video-sized frame, not a poster-sized one.
• If a clip lands in the wrong shape, the Background Color (default Black) fills the letterbox or pillarbox bars around a photo whose aspect ratio does not match the video frame.
• Leave Video Codec on H.264. AVCHD is built around H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC); it imports most cleanly into AVCHD tools. H.265 is selectable but is not part of the AVCHD spec and is commonly refused by AVCHD-era authoring software.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The MTS is completely silent" — That is expected, not a fault. A still photo carries no audio track, so there is nothing to encode into the stream even though AVCHD itself supports Dolby AC-3 and linear PCM. Add narration or music on the editing timeline after you import the clip.
• "The clip does not move" — Also expected. One CR3 becomes one frame held for the duration you set; there are no pans, zooms, or transitions. For real motion you need a moving source such as a video or a GIF.
• "My 24-megapixel photo looks soft in the clip" — A 20-or-more-megapixel sensor capture has far more detail than a video frame, so the render downscales it to fit 1080p or 4K. Detail that does not fit the frame is discarded — normal for putting a high-resolution photo into video.
• "My CR3 will not upload or convert" — Confirm it is a genuine Canon CR3 and not a renamed file, and try one file before a large batch. Very recent camera bodies occasionally need decoder updates before any tool can render them.
• "It will not play off an SD card like a camcorder clip" — What you download is the bare transport stream, without the playlist and clip-information files a camcorder writes alongside it, so copying it to a card does not rebuild a browsable AVCHD volume.

When This Doesn't Work

This conversion only makes sense for AVCHD-era pipelines, and even then it is a one-way render: the demosaic, white balance, and exposure are baked into the frame, so the editing latitude of the raw does not survive into the clip. If your CR3 comes from a brand-new body that no raw decoder yet supports, you may need Canon's Digital Photo Professional to render it first. And if your real goal is a shareable video or a plain picture rather than AVCHD footage, stop here: render CR3 to MP4 for a modern still-as-video that plays on phones, browsers, and TVs, or CR3 to JPG for an ordinary photo. Either way, keep the original .cr3 as your editable master. For an .mts from any image format, not just Canon raw, see Image to MTS.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why would I convert a CR3 photo to MTS instead of MP4?

Almost the only reason is an AVCHD-era pipeline. 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, a photograph — an .MTS clip slots into that timeline without a re-wrap. For every other purpose, CR3 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 CR3 to JPG instead.

What happens to all the raw latitude in my CR3?

It is spent at the render step. To place a CR3 into any video frame, the converter must demosaic the sensor data and bake in a white balance and exposure — the way a raw developer applies them — because transport-stream video has no concept of undeveloped raw data. CR3 stores roughly 14-bit unprocessed sensor data via Canon's crx codec inside an ISO Base Media File container; 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. Adjust white balance and exposure in a raw editor first if you want control, and keep the original .cr3 as your master.

Does this read lossy C-RAW (compressed) CR3 files too?

Yes. The CR3 format uses Canon's crx codec, which can store either lossless raw or the smaller lossy C-RAW variant introduced with the EOS R line. Both are ordinary CR3 files carrying the same kind of sensor payload as far as this conversion cares, and either way the render flattens that data into a finished video frame — so the lossless-versus-C-RAW difference does not survive into the .MTS output.

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

.MTS and .m2ts are the same BDAV MPEG-2 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 phones, browsers, and ordinary editors, an MP4 is the smaller, far more widely supported choice.

My CR3 is 24 megapixels — what resolution does the MTS clip end up?

Lower than the raw, in practice. A 20-or-more-megapixel sensor capture has far more pixels than a video frame, so leaving Video resolution on "Keep original" still produces a video-sized frame rather than a poster-sized one, and choosing a preset like 1080p or 4K UHD downscales the rendered image to fit. 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 CR3 to JPG or a lossless CR3 to TIFF rather than wrapping it in video.

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

Your CR3 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 CR3 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, not your device.