How To Retrieve and edit MOD Movies off Panasonic Camorders
There are days that there is something you see makes you just scratch your head and go What?? Well one of those came to me when I was given a Panasonic Camcorder in which there was no software just the device and USB cable and asked to retrieve the movies and make a DVD.
Upon connecting to the device I found files with the .MOD extension. Since I am running VLC I was able to double-click and was able to watch the videos. With a bit of digging I found that .MOD extension is used by JVC, Canon and Panasonic on various models of their camcorders. Here is a list of some of the models saving SD (Standard Definition) with .MOD extension.
- Canon FS100
- Canon FS10
- Canon FS11
- JVC GZ-MG30
- JVC GZ-MG70
- JVC GZ-MG37
- JVC GZ-MG77
- JVC GZ-MG50
- JVC GZ-MG130
- JVC GZ-MG155
- JVC GZ-MG255
- JVC GZ-MG555
- Panasonic SDR-S100
- Panasonic SDR-S150
- Panasonic SDR-S10
- Panasonic SDR-H18
- Panasonic SDR-H200
- Panasonic SDR-H40
- Panasonic SDR-H60
- Panasonic SDR-SW20
I found many posts of confused users on what to do with the files and how to play and convert. What .MOD file extension really is just a standard MPEG2 file, so really all you need to do is just rename to .MPG and you can edit the files with you favorite editor. To get to the files with a Windows Vista / 7 system you only need to connect the USB cable to the PC and put the camcorder in the correct USB connection mode. With the Panasonic camcorder set the camcorder to play mode and select PC\Recorder for the USB connection type and Windows will install the drivers and show a selection of what to do with the recently discovered device.
Navigated to the directory on the camcorder that has the MOD files and copy them to a place on your hard drive and just press F2 or right click, select rename and replace .mod with .mpg and that’s all.
Next step is to use your favorite editor (Sony Vegas, Adobe Premier, Kdenlive, and many others) and chain the files together into one. For details on doing that refer to the documentation and posts by others for the program if you don’t know it already. Also look for future posts here on the subject.
Hopefully this will help to clear confusion on .MOD file extension!!
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