RW2 to MTS Converter

Convert RW2 to MTS Online

Wrap a Panasonic LUMIX raw (.rw2) photo into an .MTS clip — the camcorder spelling of an AVCHD transport stream, the HD format Panasonic co-created with Sony in 2006. That shared lineage is the whole point of this pairing: a LUMIX still dropped into the very container Panasonic's own HD camcorders record to, which is exactly what a Lumix shooter does when consolidating photographs into an older AVCHD editing or disc-authoring project that only ingests .mts footage. Know going in that this is not "opening a raw in a video editor" — the converter renders your RW2 to one still frame and holds that motionless frame on screen for a duration you set, producing a silent, static clip. If you just want a normal video or a viewable photo, RW2 to MP4 and RW2 to JPG are almost certainly what you actually want.

How to Convert RW2 to MTS

1. Upload Your RW2 File: Drag and drop your .rw2 onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse — straight off a LUMIX GH, G, S, FZ, or LX body, and you can queue several frames at once.
2. Set Image Duration: Open the Image Duration control and pick how long the rendered frame is held — from a single frame 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 1920x1080 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.

RW2 vs MTS: What Goes In and What Comes Out

Frequently Asked Questions

Why convert a LUMIX RW2 to MTS instead of MP4?

Almost the only reason is an AVCHD-era pipeline — and for a Panasonic shooter the fit is the appealing part. AVCHD is the HD camcorder format Panasonic co-created with Sony in 2006, so if you are building a project in an older Panasonic-camcorder editing or disc-authoring tool that ingests .mts transport-stream footage and you need to drop in a still — a title card, a slate, a LUMIX photograph — an .MTS clip slots into that timeline without a re-wrap. For every other purpose, RW2 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 RW2 to JPG instead.

What happens to all the raw latitude in my RW2?

It is spent at the render step. To place an RW2 into any video frame, the converter must demosaic the LUMIX sensor data and bake in a white balance, exposure, and any Photo Style — the way a raw developer applies them — because transport-stream video has no concept of undeveloped raw data. RW2 holds an unprocessed Bayer mosaic, typically 12- or 14-bit per channel; the frame inside the .MTS is a finished 8-bit video frame, so the recoverable highlights, shadows, and adjustable white balance of the raw are no longer freely editable in the clip. Develop the raw in an editor that reads RW2 first if you want that control, and keep the original .rw2 as your master.

Will the MTS clip have any motion or sound?

No on both counts. The RW2 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 RW2 frames 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, music, or movement on the editing timeline after you import the clip.

My LUMIX is 20 megapixels — what resolution does the MTS clip end up?

Lower than the raw, in practice. Most LUMIX bodies in the roughly 16-to-47-megapixel class capture far more pixels than a video frame holds, so leaving Video resolution on "Keep original" still produces a video-sized frame rather than a poster-sized one, and choosing the 1920x1080 preset downscales the rendered image to fit 1080p. The detail that does not fit the chosen frame is discarded — that is normal for putting a high-resolution photo into video. If preserving every pixel matters, keep the still as an image with RW2 to JPG or a lossless RW2 to TIFF rather than wrapping it in video.

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

Your RW2 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 rendered LUMIX frame held for five seconds compresses efficiently in H.264, so the .MTS clip stays small; the main practical limit on a big job is upload size and the time it takes to send, since LUMIX raws often run tens of megabytes each. For an .mts from any image format, not just Panasonic raw, see Image to MTS.