Making HD video is fun. But one of the things everyone tends to forget is that the video is usually recorded in a proprietary format, that, as I speak, can’t be read by Windows Media Player or Adobe Premiere.

This mini-tutorial is the result of frustrations and long hours of searching. I could only do one thing with this: share.

For converting, I used a program named TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress, by Pegasys Inc. You need to buy a license for this but you can also download a 14-day evaluation version on their site. This program supports AVCHD and can convert it to a load of other formats. What I will show you here is the conversion of an AVCHD video made with a Canon HF10 camera (framerate-setting 50i, default) to MPEG-I.