MOS to MTS Converter

MOS to MTS Converter

A .mos file is the RAW capture from a Leaf Aptus medium-format digital back — high-bit-depth sensor data, often from a 22-to-80-megapixel studio sensor, that nothing outside Capture One, Lightroom, or Photoshop will open. 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 MOS down to one video-sized frame and wraps that single motionless frame in an AVCHD-style transport stream — a silent, static clip held on screen for a duration you choose. The honest reason to do it is to drop a still into an AVCHD-era editing or disc-authoring timeline that only ingests .mts footage. Because the render bakes in white balance and tone, keep your original .mos as the irreplaceable studio master. Most people instead want MOS to JPG for a web-ready picture or MOS to TIFF for the print and archival master.

MOS Format at a Glance

MTS Format at a Glance

How to Convert MOS to MTS

1. Upload Your MOS File: Drag and drop your Leaf .mos onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse — Aptus and Aptus-II captures both work, and you can queue several at once, though each medium-format RAW can run from tens to over a hundred megabytes.
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 such as 1920x1080, 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 MOS 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 in a still — a title card, a slate, a studio frame — an .MTS clip slots into that timeline without a re-wrap. For every other purpose, MOS 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 MOS to JPG instead.

My MOS is from an 80-megapixel back — what resolution does the MTS clip end up?

Far lower than the RAW, and that is unavoidable. A Leaf Aptus back in the roughly 22-to-80-megapixel class captures a huge studio image — many times more pixels than any video frame holds — so leaving Video resolution on "Keep original" still produces a video-sized frame, not a poster-sized one, and choosing a preset like 1920x1080 downscales the rendered image to fit. The detail that does not fit the chosen frame is discarded; squeezing a medium-format capture into a 1080p-class video is a massive downscale by design. If preserving every pixel matters, keep the still as an image with MOS to TIFF rather than wrapping it in video.

What happens to all the RAW latitude in my MOS?

It is spent at the render step. To put a MOS 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 back are no longer freely editable in the clip. Adjust white balance and exposure in Capture One first if you want control, and always keep the original .mos as your master — for an irreplaceable studio archive, that file is the one to protect.

Does this animate the photo or add any motion or sound?

No on both counts. The MOS 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 MOS files 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.

Is MOS the same as the IIQ files from Phase One and Leaf Credo backs?

No. .mos is the Leaf Aptus format specifically. The later Leaf Credo backs — like Phase One's own backs — write .iiq files instead. They come from the same medium-format world and share a compatibility caveat (the compressed variants can be unreadable in some editors), but they are separate formats. If your file is actually an IIQ, it needs the matching converter, not this one.

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, and many editors will not "leave files in place" on a bare .mts the way they do on a full AVCHD bundle. The clip does play in software players like VLC and imports into AVCHD-aware editors and authoring tools that rebuild the surrounding structure for you. For an .mts from any image format, not just Leaf RAW, see Image to MTS.

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

Your MOS 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 single Leaf MOS frame 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 medium-format MOS files often run from tens to over a hundred megabytes each.