3FR to SWF Converter

3FR to SWF: The Largest Photograph Meets the Deadest Container

A .3fr is Hasselblad's 3F RAW — a medium-format capture from an H-system body or a digital back, often 50 or 100 megapixels of undeveloped sensor data in a file over 100 MB. A .swf is a Shockwave Flash movie, a container whose player Adobe switched off on 31 December 2020 and began blocking on 12 January 2021.

Nothing about those two descriptions suggests a natural conversion, and this page does not pretend otherwise. What it does is develop the raw into one finished frame and hold that frame on screen inside a Flash movie — a silent, motionless clip. That is only worth doing when something specific and un-migrated demands an .swf: a kiosk player, a signage box, a legacy learning system whose ingest checks the extension. If you want the photograph, 3FR to JPG is the page. If you want a clip that plays anywhere, 3FR to MP4 is.

How to Convert 3FR to SWF

1. Upload Your 3FR File: Drag the .3fr onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Several captures can be queued, but medium-format raws are big and the transfer is the slow part of this job.
2. Set Merge strategy and Image Duration: Merge strategy chooses "Merge images" (all captures join into one clip in upload order) or "Video per image" (a separate .swf for each). Image Duration runs from a single frame at 60 fps up to 10 seconds per frame, with 5 seconds preselected.
3. Choose Video Codec, Video resolution and Background Color: Video Codec offers FLV (Sorenson Spark, preselected) and MJPEG. Video resolution opens on Keep original — worth changing, because "original" here is not what you think. Background Color fills any letterbox area and opens on White, with Black and 23 other colours available.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .swf. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, developed and encoded on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public.

Your Capture Gets a Lot Smaller Before It Is Encoded

This is the number that matters most on this page. Before any video encoding happens, the developed image is normalised and clamped to 4096 pixels on its long edge, with both dimensions rounded to even numbers. Medium format is exactly the case where that clamp bites hardest:

A 100-megapixel Hasselblad capture therefore arrives at the Flash encoder as a 12.6-megapixel picture — roughly an eighth of the pixels you paid for. Aspect ratio is preserved and nothing is cropped, but if the resolution was the point of shooting medium format, a video container is the wrong destination entirely. And even 4096 pixels wide is an unusual Flash stage: we converted a clamped capture at the default 5-second duration and read the .swf header back, which declared a stage of 4096 x 3072 at 1.0 frames per second with 5 frames, in a 2.08 MB file. For anything that has to play on a real Flash-era device, set Video resolution to Fixed Resolutions and take 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600 from the list.

What the Raw Loses on the Way In

The clip runs at one frame per second with B-frames disabled, so a five-second duration is five identical pictures. There is no pan, no zoom and no transition. Uploading several captures with "Merge images" gives you a run of held stills in upload order, which is the closest this page gets to a slideshow.

Between the two codecs, FLV is the right choice in almost every case — it is what Flash-era players expect inside a .swf, and it compresses a static frame dramatically better than MJPEG, which stores every frame as an independent JPEG with no prediction between them. On the same held-still content an MJPEG clip grows nearly linearly with duration while an FLV one barely moves. Reach for MJPEG only if something downstream specifically wants independent JPEG frames.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my 100-megapixel capture only 4096 pixels wide?

Because every image is clamped to 4096 pixels on its long edge before it reaches the video encoder, and "Keep original" means the clamped render rather than the sensor. A 100 MP capture arrives as roughly 4096 x 3072 — about 12.6 effective megapixels. That clamp exists for the video path specifically; an image target does not apply it, so 3FR to JPG and 3FR to TIFF both keep the full sensor resolution.

Does the SWF move or make any sound?

Neither. A .3fr is one photograph, so the conversion develops it and holds that single frame for the Image Duration you chose, encoded at one frame per second with B-frames off. It is silent because there is no audio anywhere in a raw capture, which is why the Audio Codec controls are not rendered for image sources at all. Add music or narration afterwards in an editor if you need it.

Can I make a slideshow out of several Hasselblad frames?

Yes, in the simplest possible sense. Queue the captures, leave Merge strategy on "Merge images", and each developed frame is held for the Image Duration in upload order — so ten captures at 5 seconds each is a fifty-second clip. There are no transitions, no cross-fades and no motion between frames; it is a hard cut from one held still to the next. "Video per image" instead writes one .swf per capture.

Will the file play in a browser?

No. Adobe ended Flash Player support on 31 December 2020 and started blocking Flash content on 12 January 2021, and no mainstream browser has shipped a Flash runtime since. The container is still readable by VLC and anything built on FFmpeg, which decode the video stream directly without needing Flash. For a file an ordinary viewer can open, 3FR to MP4 plays essentially everywhere.

FLV or MJPEG — does it matter?

Yes, mostly for size. FLV is preselected and is what Flash-era players and encoders expect to find. MJPEG encodes each frame as a full independent JPEG, so on a held still — where every frame is identical and an inter-frame codec has almost nothing to store — the MJPEG file grows roughly in proportion to duration while the FLV one stays nearly flat. Unless a downstream tool specifically asks for Motion JPEG, leave the codec alone.

Do I lose the raw editing latitude?

Completely, and twice over. The .3fr holds 16-bit undeveloped sensor data, which is why white balance, exposure and highlight recovery stay open long after the shot. Encoding video needs a finished 8-bit frame, so the file is demosaiced with the camera's recorded white balance first — and then a lossy video codec is applied on top of that. Keep the original capture; the .swf is a delivery artefact, not a copy of your work.

Will the colours match what Phocus shows?

Not exactly. Hasselblad's colour profile is tied to the individual camera and applied by Phocus during its own render, and a third-party renderer works from its own defaults instead. Differences are usually small and occasionally visible under mixed lighting. If the look matters, develop and export the frame in Phocus or Capture One first and convert the export rather than the raw.

Why is there a white border around my picture?

Because a 4:3 capture does not fill a 16:9 or 4:3 Flash stage exactly, and rather than cropping or stretching the picture the converter pads the difference with the Background Color — which opens on White. Change it to Black or a brand colour before converting, or choose a Fixed Resolution whose aspect ratio matches your capture so there is nothing to pad.

Does the Quality Preset do anything here?

Not on an image source. For codecs that support CRF the preset maps to a quality number, but neither FLV nor MJPEG works that way — for them the pipeline scales the source video's bitrate instead, and a single photograph has no source bitrate to scale. The control that does move the output is Constant Quality, whose slider is an MPEG quantiser running 1 to 31 where 1 is best (2 to 31 on MJPEG), opening at 5. That is the opposite direction from a CRF number on an MP4 page, so read it carefully.

What happens to my capture after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, developed and encoded on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours along with the clip it produced. Nothing is shared or made public, there is no sign-up and no watermark. Because a single Hasselblad capture can pass 150 MB while a motionless clip compresses to a couple of megabytes, the transfer is what you will spend your time waiting on.