Canon VIXIA HF R500 and Premiere Pro Workflow – transcode R500 MTS to MOV

Summary: If you are looking for the best way to import Canon VIXIA HF R500 AVCHD to Adobe Premiere Pro for post production, you may find what you need in this post. It explains how to transcode Canon HF R500 MTS video shootings to MPEG-2 Video format that is best suited for your Premiere Pro.

As the flagship of Canon’s VIXIA Series of consumer camcorders, the VIXIA HF R500 comes with numerous professional-quality features and the ability to shoot footage in MP4 up to 35 Mbps and AVCHD up to 28 Mbps – and even simultaneously with Dual Recording thans to two high-capacity SDXC-compatible memory card slots. Unfortunately, the Full HD AVCHD files, especially those R500 1080p/60p MTS clips, often cause troubles while editing them in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Why can’t you smoothly importing Canon HF R500 AVCHD footage footage in Premiere Pro? As Canon VIXIA HF R500 use H.264 codec for video compressing, it is a most advanced codec that compresses video in highest compression ratio, but not so acceptable for Premiere Pro (or other NLE like Avid MC, FCP, iMovie and FCE).

So if you want to get fluent editing workflow with Canon HF R500 video files in Premiere Pro (including Premiere Pro CS4/5/6) and keep the best video quality, you will have the need to convert Canon HF R500 mts to Premiere best supported format using third party software like HD Video Converter. It will be the best way to get Canon HF R500 AVCHD footage into Adobe Premiere Pro without losing quality, you can follow the tutorial below.

Download Canon HF R500 AVCHD Converter



Step 1. Click “Add video” to load Canon HF R500 AVCHD .mts video files or directly drag the files into file list. By default, the files are selected. If you would like to join all the selected files together, check the box of Merge into one. You could view the video files in preview window, simply highlight the file and click play button.



Step 2. Click “Format” bar to and choose “Adobe Premiere/Sony Vegas > MOV (AVC)(*.mov)” or “MPEG-2 Video (*.mpg)” as output format. Or you can also select “Final Cut Pro -> Apple ProRes 422 (*.mov)”. It is the best format for editing in Premiere Pro.

Optional – If you would like to customize the video and audio parameters, you can click “settings”, adjust the parameters as you want, like Video Codec, aspect ratio, bit rate, frame rate, Audio codec, sampling rate, bit rate, channels.



Step 3. Click “Convert” to start transcoding Canon HF R500 AVCHD footage to MPEG-2/AVC MOV for Premiere Pro editing without codec problems.

More tips:

AVCHD workflow with iMovie and FCE

AVCHD workflow with FCP X

Import Gopro Video to Premiere CS6?