Choosing custom thumbnail images

Silverstack offers a mechanism to define custom thumbnails to get a better overview of your shots – scenes – takes and allow you to navigate faster within your project library to visually locate clips.

Default behavior#

Silverstack analyzes the length of a clip and picks the thumbnail image from the middle of the take by default. It’s possible to customize the default thumbnail position in the Settings > Media menu. The thumbnail position can be set to ‘Begin’, ‘Middle’ and ‘End’ of a clip:

The Media Settings menu

While this works correctly for most situations, it might happen by coincidence that a black frame, a meaningless moment or an out of focus frame is automatically picked for the thumbnail image, which would not be helpful when trying to quickly identify the right take from the table view, collection view or in the reports.

It’s also possible to change the automatic thumbnail selection in those situations.

Customizing clip thumbnails#

Recreating thumbnails#

If you would like to recreate the thumbnails for a group of clips in your project library at once, you can do so by selecting the clips and then choosing Edit > Recreate Thumbnails. All the thumbnails for the selected clips will be then recreated.

Choosing a specific frame as a thumbnail for a clip#

In order choose a relevant frame for a clip or to customize your reports with a thumbnail that matches your criteria, simply select the clip in question, switch into the Playback View and locate the right frame. From there you can scrub to the desired frame and set your thumbnail via Edit > Set Thumbnail Frame. You can alternatively use the Shortcut ⌘ + Tto set the current frame as the thumbnail for the clip.

Playback view in Silverstack