Is Sony Handycam HDR-SR11 Mac compatible?

Sony Handycam Mac/pc help please?

• I have a sony hdr-cx110 handycam and am taking it overseas to take plenty of film. I don't have that much memory on the card so i am taking a lenovo laptop (running windows 7) to load the videos onto to free up space. But when i get home i want to transfer it onto my imacs (running osx 10.6.8) imovie. My problem is when i transfer the videos from the lenovo to the mac (via usb flash), the mac doesnt recognise the file (its a mpeg file). If i didnt explain that very well please let me know, im not very good with computers :) Thank you in advance

• Answer:

  The Sony HDR-CX110 camcorder records AVCHD compressed video into MTS or M2TS files. Normally, you would connect the camcorder to the Mac, launch the video editor and import or capture the video. In this method, the camcorder's processor is used to decompress the video from the compressed MTS file to an uncompressed version that the video editor can deal with. You are not doing that... When you copied the files to the computer (does not matter if Windows, Linux, Mac OSX or other operating system) you took the camcorder and that processor out of the process flow. In order to deal with the video, it needs to be transcoded. You need to convert the video with MPEG StreamClip from www.squared5.com and Handbrake from www.handbrake.fr are both good - there are several others that can provide that conversion into a decompressed, high quality high definition h.264 MOV file type version that iMovie can deal with. These files will take lots of hard disc drive space... 60 minutes of decompressed high definition video will consume about 44 gig of computer hard disc drive space. You explained it just fine... but just to be clear, you are not "filming" - there is no film involved. You are capturing digital video (and audio). Good for you for trying to get the process flow working BEFORE you actually need it.