How To View Clips as Thumbnails

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When you are editing a large project in Final Cut Pro, your footage can sometimes get out of control. This is especially true if you have multiple editors working on a single project. Sometimes it is easier to see a picture of the clip rather than just the file names, there are a couple of ways to go about this.

Setting Up Thumbnails

There are a few ways to see the thumbnails of your clips. The first way is to change the browser view from a list to icons. To do this, you right/control click in the browser then choose View as Small/Medium/Large Icons. You will immediately see that your video clips have changed from the video icon () to a thumbnail clip of the video.

The shortcut for this view changing action is Shift + H. Pressing this multiple times will cycle through the list view and the three different icon views. Alternatively you can go to View > Browser Items and you will have the same options there.

Sometimes you need to see the images and have all the info available in the list view. To do this when you are in the list view, right/control click on the top bar of the browser (by default this says Duration/In/Out/Media Start…). You will then get a drop down menu with all the available options, click the bottom choice Show Thumbnail and a new column will come up with the images.

Tips For Using Thumbnails

Thumbnails make it much easier to see what your footage is especially if you are a visual learner like myself.
When you have the thumbnail column in the list view, you can scrub through the video without opening the clip. To do this simply click and drag the thumbnail and you will see it play. This can be very useful to see the contents of a clip on the fly.
In order to scrub through the video in the Icon view (medium and large only), you must select the scrub tool from the tool palette (see image) or press h,h. Then you can click and drag the video just as you would in the list view.