CRW to MTS Converter

Turning a Canon CRW Photo Into an MTS Clip: What to Expect

This walkthrough is for anyone holding an early-2000s Canon .crw RAW who needs it as an .MTS file — the camcorder spelling of an AVCHD transport stream, the format Sony and Panasonic HD camcorders record to. Read the first section before you start, because this is not "opening a RAW in a video editor": the tool renders your CRW to one still frame and holds that motionless frame on screen for a duration you set, producing a silent, static clip. If you actually want a viewable photo or an ordinary video, CRW to JPG and CRW to MP4 are almost certainly what you are after.

How to Convert CRW to MTS

1. Upload Your CRW File: Drag and drop your Canon .crw onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse — straight off an EOS D30, D60, 10D, or 300D, or a PowerShot G1–G5, and you can queue several frames at once. Any companion .thm thumbnails are harmless if they come along.
2. Set the Image Duration: Open the Image Duration control and pick how long the rendered frame is held — the "Duration" dropdown ranges from 1/60 of a second up to 10 seconds per frame, and defaults to 5 seconds. Use the Merge strategy to choose "Merge images" (one combined clip) or "Video per image" (a separate .MTS per photo).
3. Set Quality, 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 the bars a 3:2 photo leaves in a 16:9 frame. Video Codec defaults to H.264 under Advanced Options, which is exactly what AVCHD tools expect.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and save your silent .MTS clip. No sign-up, no watermark.

Walk-through: Picking a Duration and Frame Size for an Old Canon Still

The two settings that decide what your clip looks like are Image Duration and Video resolution, and CRW is an unusually friendly case for the second one. These files came off 3-to-6-megapixel sensors, so unlike a modern 24-megapixel RAW there is barely any downscaling to fight. A 3.1-megapixel EOS D30 frame is about 2160x1440 — only a modest step down to fit 1080p, not the drastic shrink a current camera forces. The 3:2 shape of the photo does not match a 16:9 video frame, though, so the converter pillarboxes it and fills the side bars with your chosen Background Color.

• For a title card or slate you will trim on the timeline: set the Duration to 5 seconds (the default) — long enough to grab and cut, short enough to keep the file tiny.
• For a held establishing shot: push the Duration up toward 8 to 10 seconds per frame so the clip stands on its own without looping.
• To match an existing 1080p AVCHD project exactly: choose the fixed 1920x1080 preset rather than "Keep original", so the frame size lines up with the rest of your footage and no editor has to rescale it.
• To avoid the side bars standing out: set Background Color to Black for a neutral letterbox, or White if your project is on a light background.
• For several photos as one sequence: choose "Merge images" under Merge strategy; each still is shown in turn for its set Duration — a back-to-back sequence of stills, not a cross-faded slideshow.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The clip plays but nothing moves" — that is correct, not a fault. A single CRW becomes a static frame held for the Duration you set; there is no pan, zoom, or transition. Add motion on your editing timeline after import.
• "There is no sound on the MTS" — also expected. A still photo carries no audio, so there is nothing to encode, even though AVCHD itself supports Dolby AC-3 and linear PCM. Add narration or music after you import the clip.
• "My photo has black bars down the sides" — a 3:2 Canon still does not fill a 16:9 frame, so the converter pillarboxes it. Change the Background Color to taste, or crop the source to 16:9 first if you need edge-to-edge.
• "The upload is rejected or the RAW will not decode" — confirm the file really is a Canon CIFF .crw and not a renamed CR2; a corrupted or partially copied RAW can also fail. Re-copy it from the card and retry.
• "My editor still will not import the MTS" — some newer editors dropped native AVCHD ingest entirely. In that case wrap the still as CRW to MP4 instead, which today's editors all accept.

When This Doesn't Work

This pairing exists for one narrow job: slotting an early-Canon still into an older AVCHD editing or disc-authoring timeline that only ingests .MTS footage. It is the wrong tool everywhere else. If you want to keep the picture editable, do not wrap it in video at all — the RAW latitude is spent the moment it is rendered, so archive the .crw and export a master with CRW to TIFF. If you only need a shareable image, CRW to JPG is smaller and opens everywhere. And if the CRW itself will not decode — a damaged early-2000s file, or one your software no longer reads — develop it in Canon's Digital Photo Professional or RawTherapee first, then convert the result. Keep the original .crw regardless; for irreplaceable early-digital captures it is your only full-quality source.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why would I convert a Canon RAW still 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, an early-Canon photograph — an .MTS clip slots into that timeline without a re-wrap. For every other purpose, CRW 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 CRW to JPG instead.

Will the MTS clip have any motion or sound?

No on both counts. The CRW is rendered to one still frame, and that 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 supports Dolby AC-3 and linear PCM audio. Choose "Merge images" under Merge strategy to join several CRW frames back to back — a sequence of stills, each shown for its set Duration, not a cross-faded slideshow. Add music or narration on the editing timeline after import.

My CRW is only 3 megapixels — will it look soft as a 1080p clip?

Less than you might fear, and this is the rare case where the downscale is gentle. Early Canon bodies in the 3-to-6-megapixel class capture close to a 1080p frame already: a 3.1-megapixel EOS D30 image is roughly 2160x1440, only a modest step down to fit 1920x1080, where a modern 24-megapixel RAW would be shrunk hard. The 3:2 photo does not fill a 16:9 frame, so expect pillarbox bars padded with your chosen Background Color. If you would rather keep every captured pixel, hold the still as an image with CRW to JPG or a lossless CRW to TIFF instead of wrapping it in video.

What happens to the RAW editing latitude when I make the MTS?

It is spent at the render step. To place a CRW into any video frame, the converter must demosaic Canon's sensor data and bake in a white balance, exposure, and tone, because transport-stream video has no concept of undeveloped RAW. CRW stores an unprocessed, losslessly compressed sensor capture in Canon's CIFF container; the frame inside the .MTS is a finished 8-bit H.264 video frame, so the recoverable highlights and adjustable white balance of the RAW are no longer freely editable in the clip. Develop the RAW in Canon's Digital Photo Professional, Lightroom, or RawTherapee first if you want that control, and keep the original .crw as your master — for early-2000s archives it is often irreplaceable.

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 Canon RAW, see Image to MTS.

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

In our testing, a 3-megapixel CRW rendered into a 1080p .MTS held for five seconds produced a small clip, since one static frame compresses efficiently in H.264. Your CRW 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. The main practical limit on a big job is upload size and time, though early-Canon CRW files are typically only a few megabytes each, so they move quickly even in batches.