I picked up a Sony HDR-SR11 a few weeks ago and have been playing around with it, getting used to it. I'm to the point now where I have enough footage and would like to do something with it.

Here's my problem...I'm paranoid about making sure I have important things like photos and videos properly backed up in case of disaster. I would like to pull the video files off the camera for archiving, so that when I am ready to get deep into editing and creating videos/DVDs (I don't have a Blu-ray recorder yet) I have the original videos I shot.

But I'm having a lot of problems figuring out how to do this. I used the Sony software to import the videos onto my computer, but it changed the format from .MTS to (I believe) .MTS2, which I have not been able to find an editing program for. I don't want to archive MTS2 files if they can ONLY be viewed/edited in Sony's software.

I was able to finally import the MTS files into iMovie, but strangely it will only import them directly from the camera. I tried moving a file from my camera to the desktop and iMovie would not recognize it. I had the same problem with Final Cut Express.

So I'm kind of lost. I think the first step is that I would like to figure out the best way to get the files off the camera so as to ensure maximum compatibility with whatever program(s) I decide to edit them with in the future (whether DVD or Blu-ray), because it doesn't seem like just taking the files off the camera and archiving them to data DVD for later import into a video editing program will do the trick. I would like to get this figured out before I remove any videos from the camera.

If I have to pull the native files from the camera into iMovie or whatever and convert the format I guess that would be fine, but I tried that with one video and it took the resolution down to 960 rather than the 1080 it was shot in. So that won't work, at least not that particular method.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm new to all of this and can't find the solution.