DNG to MTS Converter

DNG to MTS Converter

A DNG is Adobe's Digital Negative — an open RAW format holding the unprocessed sensor data your camera or phone captured, with white balance, exposure, and tone still adjustable. An .MTS file is the camcorder spelling of an AVCHD video stream: the format Sony and Panasonic HD camcorders record to. This conversion is unusual and worth understanding before you run it — it does not "open a RAW in a video editor." It renders the DNG to a single viewable frame and then wraps that one motionless frame in an AVCHD-style transport stream: a silent clip held on screen for a duration you choose, with no motion and no audio. The honest reason to do it is to slot a still photo into an AVCHD-era editing or disc-authoring timeline that only ingests .mts footage. Because the render bakes in develop settings, keep your original .dng as the editable master. Most people want DNG to MP4 for a modern still-as-video, or DNG to JPG for a plain picture.

DNG Format at a Glance

MTS Format at a Glance

How to Convert DNG to MTS

1. Upload Your DNG File: Drag and drop your .dng onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse — Lightroom exports, Apple ProRAW captures, and Leica, Pentax, or Ricoh DNGs 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 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 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.

Frequently Asked Questions

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

Almost the only reason is an AVCHD-era pipeline. If you are building or authoring a project in an older editor or disc tool that ingests .mts transport-stream footage and you need to drop a still — a title card, a slate, a photograph — into that timeline, an .MTS clip slots in without a re-wrap. For every other purpose, DNG 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 DNG to JPG instead.

Does this animate the photo or add any motion?

No. The DNG 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, not a moving shot. There are no pans, zooms, or transitions; an .MTS made from one photo is motionless from first frame to last. If you upload several DNGs and choose "Merge images" under Merge strategy, they are joined back to back — each shown in turn for its set duration — which is a sequence of stills, not a cross-faded slideshow. For real motion you need a moving source such as a video or a GIF.

Will the MTS clip have any sound?

No — it is silent. A still image carries no audio track, so there is nothing to encode into the AVCHD stream, even though the AVCHD format itself supports Dolby AC-3 and linear PCM. If you need narration or music over the still, add it on the editing timeline after you import the .mts clip, or build the piece as an MP4 where adding an audio track later is simpler.

What happens to all the RAW latitude in my DNG?

It is spent at the render step. To put a DNG 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. The frame inside the .MTS is a finished 8-bit video frame, not a raw sensor readout, so the recoverable highlights, shadows, and adjustable white balance of the digital negative are no longer freely editable in the clip. Adjust white balance and exposure in a RAW editor first if you want control, and always keep the original .dng as your master.

My DNG 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 a video. If preserving every pixel matters, keep the still as an image with DNG to JPG or a lossless DNG to TIFF rather than wrapping it in video.

Is the DNG format still maintained as a standard?

Yes, and it is now more official than ever. Adobe introduced DNG in September 2004 as an openly documented RAW specification built on the TIFF 6.0 structure, compatible with the older TIFF/EP standard (ISO 12234-2). In 2026 it was published as an international standard, ISO 12234-4, after more than two decades as an open Adobe format. It is shot natively by Leica, Pentax, and Ricoh, and produced by Apple ProRAW and other smartphone RAW captures as well as Lightroom archives — so a DNG you convert today rests on a documented, now-standardized format.

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 RAW, see Image to MTS.

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

Your DNG 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 DNG 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.