Setting a “Poster Frame” for Clips and Why You Would Want To

There’s a neat functionality in the Browser that allows you to see “thumbnails” (“poster frames”) for each clip in your Browser and it has a very cool scrubbing feature to boot. To enable this, right-click on any Browser column header and toggle on the “Thumbnails” column and you will now see the thumbnails. Pretty cool, eh?

Note that this new column will appear to the left of whichever column you right-clicked and I like to have my thumbnails column on the leftmost side, so I right-click the left-most column to invoke (you can also drag it there, once it’s showing).

This gives you a very useful visual look at your clip content and by default, the first frame of the clip is displayed. If that weren’t enough however, note that you can use your mouse to actually scrub the content by clicking and dragging left and right in the thumbnail itself! When you release the mouse, the thumbnail reverts to the first frame again.

In cases where, say, all of your clips start with a slate, this can be kind of useless, but alas there are two ways to change the default thumbnail image to whatever you want it to be. The first is done by opening the clip in the Viewer, slewing to the frame you want and hitting CTRL P

The other way is even easier: while scrubbing the thumbnail in the Browser (as described above), simply press and hold the CTRL key, release the mouse button and voilà, you have a new poster frame!

In situations where you have a lot of clips to sort and assess and they can be easily recognized by a poster frame (maybe some are talking heads, some are outdoor, etc.), this can be a powerful way to save time in the rough cutting process.