DCR to MTS Converter

Convert DCR to MTS: What This Tutorial Covers

This page walks through turning a Kodak .DCR 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. DCR is the Kodak Digital Camera Raw file written by Kodak's professional DCS-series DSLRs, a line Kodak left in May 2005, so a .dcr you have today may be a 20-year-old professional original. This is not "opening a raw in a video editor": the converter renders your DCR to one still frame and wraps that single motionless frame in an AVCHD-style stream, producing 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 actually want a picture or a normal modern video, the escape hatches at the end — DCR to JPG and DCR to MP4 — are almost certainly what you want, and for preservation the archival master is DCR to TIFF.

How to Convert DCR to MTS

1. Upload Your DCR File: Drag and drop your Kodak .dcr onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse — straight off a DCS 720x, DCS 760, DCS Pro 14n, SLR/n, SLR/c, or a DCS Pro Back. 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 the 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: Rendering a RAW Negative Into a Video Frame

The thing to understand about this job is that a DCR is an undeveloped negative, not a picture. It holds the sensor's high-bit Bayer mosaic — 12-to-14-bit data with the white balance, exposure, and tone still open to interpretation. A transport stream has no concept of that. So before it can write a single byte of .mts, the converter has to develop the raw: demosaic the mosaic, apply a white balance and exposure, and flatten it to an ordinary 8-bit video frame. That frame is a rendered interpretation, and the latitude that made DCR worth keeping does not survive into it. A few patterns follow from that:

• If you want control over the look, develop the DCR in a raw editor first (Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, RawTherapee), export a finished image, and bring that into the timeline — don't rely on the converter's default development for a shot that matters.
• If you are placing one still as a slate or title card, leave Image Duration at 5 seconds per frame, or raise it toward 10; the single rendered frame then sits on screen for that whole time.
• If you are assembling several DCRs into one .mts, set the 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, set Video resolution to a fixed 1920x1080 preset so the rendered photo is fitted to a standard AVCHD frame. A DCS Pro capture is a 6-to-14-megapixel-class image, far larger than a video frame, so it is downscaled to fit either way.
• Leave Video Codec on H.264. AVCHD is built around H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC); 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" — 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 audio. Add narration or music on the editing timeline after you import the clip.
• "The clip does not move" — Also expected. One DCR 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 photo looks soft in the clip" — A DCS-series 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.
• "The colors or exposure look off" — That is the default development showing. The converter picked a white balance and exposure for you; for a controlled look, develop the DCR in a raw editor first, then convert the result.
• "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 raw's editing latitude is gone. The bigger risk with DCR specifically is the decoder: Kodak left the professional DSLR business in May 2005, so the software that can still read these files is slowly thinning, and a very old or unusual .dcr may not render in every tool. If that happens, develop it once in Adobe Camera Raw or RawTherapee, which still support the DCS line, and convert the exported image instead. And if your real goal is a shareable video or a plain picture rather than AVCHD footage, stop here: render DCR to MP4 for a modern still-as-video that plays on phones, browsers, and TVs, or DCR to JPG for an ordinary photo. Either way, keep the original .dcr archived as your master, since it may be the only copy of a 20-year-old shot. For an .mts from any image format, not just Kodak raw, see Image to MTS.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why would I convert a DCR 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, an archival photograph — an .MTS clip slots into that timeline without a re-wrap. For every other purpose, DCR 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 DCR to JPG instead, and for a print or preservation master use DCR to TIFF.

Is DCR uncompressed, and does this conversion lose quality because of that?

DCR is not uncompressed — this is the most common myth about the format, repeated by several "what is a DCR file" pages and converters. It is a TIFF-based Kodak raw that stores the sensor mosaic with lossless compression (lossless-JPEG, the same approach Canon's CR2 and Adobe's DNG use), so no image information is discarded in the file itself. Whatever quality you lose making an .MTS has nothing to do with DCR's compression: it comes from the render. To put the raw into a video frame the converter must demosaic it, bake in a white balance and exposure, and flatten 12-to-14-bit sensor data into a finished 8-bit frame — and then downscale that frame to video size. That render, not the format, is where the latitude and resolution go.

What happens to all the raw latitude in my DCR?

It is spent at the render step. The 12-to-14-bit sensor data in a DCR is what lets you recover blown highlights, lift shadows, and reset white balance long after the shot. To place that data into any video frame, the converter has to develop it — demosaic, white-balance, expose, flatten — because a transport stream has no notion of undeveloped raw. The frame inside the .MTS is a finished video frame, not a sensor readout, so those recoverable highlights, shadows, and adjustable white balance are no longer freely editable in the clip. Develop the DCR in a raw editor first if you want control over the look, and keep the original .dcr as your master.

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 expect that extension. For phones, browsers, and ordinary editors, an MP4 is the smaller, far more widely supported choice.

Will this .MTS file play off an SD card like a real camcorder clip?

Not as a card structure. What you download is the bare transport stream — the part that lives inside an AVCHD card's BDMV/STREAM/ folder — without the playlist and clip-information files a camcorder writes alongside it. Copying it onto an SD card will not reproduce a browsable AVCHD volume that a camera or set-top player navigates. The clip does play in software players like VLC and imports into AVCHD-aware editors and authoring tools (such as tsMuxeR or multiAVCHD) that rebuild the surrounding structure for you. For an .mts from any image format, not just Kodak raw, see Image to MTS.

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

Your DCR 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 full-resolution DCS-series DCR 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 DCR files from Kodak DCS Pro bodies often run tens of megabytes each. For irreplaceable originals, keep the .dcr archived alongside the clip.