RW2 to HEVC Converter

Convert RW2 to HEVC Online

This tool develops a Panasonic LUMIX RW2 RAW photograph and encodes it with HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding, also known as H.265), the successor codec to H.264. The result is a short silent video clip holding your photo — handy for feeding a still into an HEVC-only pipeline, testing a decoder, or producing a compact frame for a modern playback device. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours.

One thing to know up front, because it surprises people: HEVC is a codec, not a container. The .hevc file this page produces is not a raw elementary stream — it is a Matroska file that happens to carry the .hevc extension. That is deliberate and it is what makes the output playable, but it does mean a rename is sometimes needed. Details below.

How to Convert RW2 to HEVC

1. Upload Your RW2 Files: Drag and drop your .rw2 files onto the page or click "+ Add Files". A single photo becomes a freeze-frame clip; several become a sequence in upload order.
2. Set Merge strategy and Image Duration: Merge strategy is preselected to Merge images, joining the batch into one clip; Video per image writes a separate file per photo. Image Duration is preselected to 5 seconds per frame and ranges from 1/60 s to 10 s.
3. Choose Background Color and Video resolution: Background Color is preselected to White and fills any letterbox or pillarbox bars left when your photo's shape does not match the video frame. Video resolution is preselected to Keep original, with Fixed Resolutions, height-only Preset Resolutions, Width, Height and Width x Height also available. The Video Codec list holds only H.265 and HEVC — two names for the same thing — so there is nothing to decide there.
4. Set File Compression and Convert: File Compression opens on Quality Preset at Very High and also offers Constant Quality and Constraint Quality; bitrate and file-size modes are hidden for still sources. Click Convert and download. No sign-up, no watermark.

What the Default Settings Produce

Measured end to end on a 20-megapixel Panasonic DC-GH5 RW2 (24.2 MB source).

Two notes on that measurement. The file is a Matroska container, verifiable in one command: the first four bytes are the EBML magic number, exactly as an .mkv would be. And the HEVC output came out slightly larger than the H.264 output from the same photo — 7.3 MB against 6.7 MB — because the default quality preset targets a higher quality level on H.265 than on H.264. HEVC's efficiency advantage shows on real motion over many frames, not on five identical stills.

HEVC vs H.264 for a Still Photograph

For a still, the honest recommendation is that H.265 buys you nothing unless the destination requires it. RW2 to MP4 gives you an H.264 clip that plays everywhere, and RW2 to MKV gives you the same Matroska container this page produces but with a normal .mkv extension and a full codec list.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my .hevc file actually a Matroska file, and does that matter?

Because a bare HEVC elementary stream is barely usable — it has no duration, no timestamps and no index, so most players either refuse it or play it at the wrong speed. Wrapping the stream in Matroska gives it proper timing and makes it seekable. We verified the output starts with the EBML signature 1A 45 DF A3, which is the Matroska file header. It matters only for compatibility: players that dispatch on file extension may not recognise .hevc. Rename the file to .mkv and it will open in VLC, MPV, most editors and anything else that reads Matroska.

My player says the .hevc file is unsupported — what do I do?

Rename it to .mkv first. That fixes the majority of cases, because the byte content is already a valid Matroska file and only the extension was confusing the player. If it still refuses, the problem is the codec rather than the container: not every device decodes HEVC, and desktop Chrome and Firefox in particular have inconsistent support. In that case convert to RW2 to MP4 instead, which produces H.264 and plays essentially everywhere.

Why is the HEVC file bigger than the H.264 version of the same photo?

Because HEVC's advantage is in predicting motion between differing frames, and a still photograph held for five seconds gives it nothing to predict — the second through fifth frames are identical to the first for both codecs. On top of that the default Very High preset targets a higher quality level on H.265 than on H.264, so it spends more bits on the one frame that matters. We measured 7,634,399 bytes for HEVC against 7,001,989 bytes for H.264 from the same source. On real footage the relationship reverses sharply; on a still it does not.

Does the clip have any audio?

No. A photograph has no soundtrack, so the Audio Codec menu is hidden entirely for image sources and the file is written with a video track only — no audio stream at all, rather than a silent one. If a downstream system insists on an audio stream being present, add a silent track in a video editor after conversion.

Why is the video 4096 pixels wide when my camera shoots 5184?

Every still is clamped to 4096 pixels on its long edge before encoding, because the image demuxer becomes unreliable above that limit. Our GH5 file developed to 5208 × 3904 and reached the encoder at 4096 × 3070 — aspect ratio preserved, nothing cropped, roughly a 21% reduction in linear resolution. That is still comfortably above 4K, so for most purposes you will want to set a smaller Fixed Resolution anyway. If you actually wanted every pixel of the RAW, use RW2 to JPG rather than a video target.

Why does one photo produce a motionless clip?

Because that is all a single RW2 contains. There is no timeline or movement inside a photograph, so the conversion holds the developed picture on screen for the Image Duration you set — five seconds by default — as identical frames at 1 fps. Upload several RW2 files and leave Merge strategy on Merge images to build a sequence that actually changes.

Will HEVC preserve the RAW's 10-bit or 12-bit colour depth?

No. HEVC's Main 10 profile can carry 10-bit video, but the RAW is developed to 8-bit sRGB before it ever reaches the encoder — we confirmed the developed frame is 8 bits per channel — and the encode is written as yuv420p, which is 8-bit 4:2:0. There is no bit-depth control on this page. If you need to preserve tonal depth from the RW2 you need RAW software writing a 16-bit file, not a video converter; note that our RW2 to TIFF output is also 8-bit and will not do it either.

Will the colours match what my camera showed?

Closely, but not exactly. The develop applies the white balance your camera recorded rather than a generic daylight setting — we verified this on a file shot in Cloudy white balance, whose output matched a camera-white-balance render and clearly differed from a daylight one. What is not reproduced is Panasonic's Photo Style contrast and saturation curve or the in-camera lens profile, so the result reads slightly brighter and slightly flatter than the camera's own JPEG. There is no HDR tone-mapping step anywhere in the pipeline.

What happens to my RW2 file after conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. Nothing is shared or made public, there is no sign-up, and no watermark is added. Keep the original RW2 regardless — the video bakes in white balance, exposure and tone, and none of the RAW's editing latitude survives the trip.