X3F to SWF Converter

How to Convert X3F to SWF Online

1. Upload Your X3F File: Drag and drop or click "+ Add Files" to load Sigma Foveon RAW frames. Batch upload is supported, and a single Sigma SD1 Merrill or DP Merrill X3F is roughly 50 MB while Quattro-series X3F runs around 45 MB, so plan your upload time accordingly.
2. Pick Merge Strategy and Duration: Choose "Merge images" to chain every X3F into one SWF slideshow, or "Video per image" to emit one SWF per RAW. Set Duration (default 5 seconds per frame) to anything from 1/60 second up to 10 seconds, then pick a Background Color (default Black) — this fills any letterboxed area when an X3F frame does not match the output aspect ratio.
3. Adjust Quality Preset and Resolution (Optional): Pick a Quality Preset (Very High is the recommended default; Lowest through Highest are available under both Constant Quality and Constraint Quality modes). For Video Resolution, keep original, pick a preset (240p through 4320p / 8K), or enter custom Width x Height in pixels — Foveon Quattro files are 5424 x 3616 native, so downscaling is usually appropriate for SWF playback.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and download your.swf file. Conversion runs on our servers — no sign-up, no watermark.

Why Convert X3F to SWF?

X3F is Sigma's proprietary RAW container written by Foveon X3-sensor cameras: the SD9 (2002), SD10, SD14, SD15, SD1/SD1 Merrill, DP1/DP2 (and Merrill variants), the dp Quattro line from 2014, and the sd Quattro / sd Quattro H from 2016. SWF (Small Web Format / Shockwave Flash) is the legacy Adobe playback container that Adobe formally end-of-lifed on December 31, 2020, with Flash Player blocking embedded content starting January 12, 2021. Almost no modern browser will play a fresh SWF, so this conversion is overwhelmingly an archive or pipeline task rather than a publishing one.

• Restoring a Flash-era CD-ROM or kiosk project — Museums, schools, and design studios that built Foveon-based slideshow kiosks against an early-2000s Flash projector pipeline can regenerate the original SWF asset from new X3F captures while a legacy desktop projector (such as Adobe Flash Player Projector running offline) is still in use.
• Feeding standalone Flash projectors and Ruffle — The open-source Ruffle emulator reimplements SWF playback and continues to add ActionScript 1/2 coverage; a freshly produced SWF is a workable input for Ruffle-driven retro web archives.
• Migrating an SWF-locked slideshow toolchain — Some older edutainment and presentation tools (Articulate Presenter pre-2017, Adobe Captivate's classic SWF output) only accept SWF; turning your Foveon-era SD1 Merrill 46 MP captures into SWF avoids rebuilding the project.
• Re-encoding archive masters at lower resolution — Foveon Merrill and Quattro X3F files are 45-50 MB each, so a 200-image walk-through becomes ~10 GB of RAW; one merged SWF at 720p or 1080p is far smaller and easier to ship on a USB stick to a museum exhibit.
• Bridge to modern formats — Many users want SWF only as a stepping-stone. If the goal is web playback today, output to MP4 or WebM instead: see X3F to MP4 or X3F to WebM, which both render in every major browser without a plug-in.

X3F vs SWF — Format Comparison

Quality Preset and Resolution Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Why would anyone convert X3F to SWF in 2026?

Almost no one is publishing SWF to the open web today — Adobe ended Flash Player support on December 31, 2020 and began blocking content January 12, 2021, and every mainstream browser has removed the runtime. The realistic use cases left are archival: feeding a museum kiosk that still uses Adobe Flash Player Projector, regenerating an asset for an older Articulate or Adobe Captivate project, producing SWF for the Ruffle open-source emulator, or migrating a Foveon photography pipeline that historically dumped slideshow SWFs. If you actually want to share Foveon images as video on the modern web, use X3F to MP4 or X3F to WebM instead.

Will the converted SWF play in my browser?

Probably not in a stock browser. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari all dropped Flash Player support in 2020-2021, and Safari 14 (September 2020) was the first macOS release shipped without it. SWF playback in 2026 generally requires either the standalone Adobe Flash Player Projector (still downloadable from Adobe's archived debug-tools page) running offline, or the open-source Ruffle browser extension / desktop player, which currently supports most ActionScript 1/2 content and is steadily expanding AS3 coverage.

Does this conversion preserve the per-pixel color depth of the Foveon sensor?

No. The Foveon X3 sensor stacks three photodiodes per pixel site (sensitive to blue, green, and red light at progressively deeper silicon layers — roughly 0.2 μm, 0.8 μm, and 3.2 μm), producing 12- or 14-bit raw color per channel. SWF's bitmap stream is 8-bit RGBA at best, so the dynamic range and color discrimination unique to Foveon RAW collapse to standard 8-bit-per-channel video. For pixel-perfect Foveon archival, keep the X3F or convert to a 16-bit format like X3F to TIFF.

How long does each X3F still appear in the output SWF?

That is controlled by the Duration option — default is 5 seconds per frame. You can also pick fractional durations (1/60, 1/30, 1/24, 1/10, 1/5, 1/3, 1/2 second) or whole-second values up to 10 seconds. Merrill-series 46 MP captures often look best at 3-5 seconds because viewers want time to actually appreciate the detail; rapid 1/24-second sequences turn a still set into a low-frame-rate motion clip, which is usually not what photographers want.

Can I batch-convert multiple X3F files into a single SWF slideshow?

Yes. Upload all your X3F files and choose "Merge images" under Merge Strategy. They are added to the SWF timeline in the order they appear in the upload list, with the Duration setting controlling per-frame time and the Background Color filling any letterboxing when the source aspect ratio (3:2 on Sigma DSLRs, varies on dp Quattro) does not match the output resolution. To output one SWF per X3F instead, pick "Video per image".

Why is a single Sigma X3F file so large?

A Foveon X3 sensor records three color samples at every photosite instead of one through a Bayer color filter array, so the raw payload is roughly three times the size of an equivalent-pixel Bayer RAW. That puts SD1 Merrill and DP Merrill X3F at about 50 MB per frame for 46-million-effective-pixel output, and Quattro-series X3F at about 45 MB because Quattro splits the layers as 20 MP top / 5 MP middle / 5 MP bottom. Expect a 50-image shoot to land around 2-2.5 GB on disk before conversion.

Is the embedded SWF audio track available for an image-to-SWF conversion?

No — X3F is a still-image format with no audio, so a SWF generated from X3F frames is silent. If you need a soundtrack on a Flash-era slideshow, the standard workflow is to convert the X3F set to SWF here, then mux a separate audio asset in Adobe Animate or an open-source SWF editor before final export.

Should I use Constant Quality or Constraint Quality?

Constant Quality holds visual quality steady and lets file size float — best when you want every frame to look the same and do not care if the final SWF is 8 MB or 80 MB. Constraint Quality caps quality so the file stays predictably small — useful when your delivery medium (a CD-ROM partition, a kiosk's onboard storage, a Ruffle bundle) has a hard size budget. For both, "Very High" is a sensible starting preset; drop to "Medium" or "Low" only if Constraint Quality output still exceeds your size target.

What if my downstream tool rejects the SWF version?

xconvert produces SWF via FFmpeg's swf muxer, which writes a SWF7-compatible bitstream — that's compatible with Adobe Flash Player 7 and later, with Ruffle, and with most third-party SWF tooling. If your downstream toolchain insists on a specific older SWF version (some kiosk firmware locks to SWF6) you will likely need to import the resulting SWF into Adobe Animate and re-publish targeting that version, since FFmpeg does not emit SWF6 directly.