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Poster Frames/Thumbnail Generation

After finding out much to my dismay that Final Cut Pro does not natively export files with a thumbnail, I was told in the FCP forum that Compressor handles this easily. I purchased Compressor, followed the directions for setting a poster frame, and exported multiple files only to find that this method also does not seem to create a thumbnail preview of my videos so that I can publish them to social media channels without presenting a blank, black screen.

What am I doing wrong? This seems like such a simple thing to do yet I remain stymied.

MacBook Air (M2, 2022)

Posted on Sep 8, 2024 9:10 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 9, 2024 9:58 AM

stephenpeterson wrote:
. . . exported multiple files only to find that this method also does not seem to create a thumbnail preview of my videos so that I can publish them to social media channels without presenting a blank, black screen.

Check the ingest procedure at the site(s) you are uploading to.

To change the thumbnail on YouTube, for example, see:

https://youtu.be/5K4fbyl5Y3M?si=XslS6M4Q270cQ6qD


Vimeo, also allows you to set the display thumbnail after uploading the file. Not sure about the other social media sites as I don't upload to them.


MtD


MTD

4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 9, 2024 9:58 AM in response to stephenpeterson

stephenpeterson wrote:
. . . exported multiple files only to find that this method also does not seem to create a thumbnail preview of my videos so that I can publish them to social media channels without presenting a blank, black screen.

Check the ingest procedure at the site(s) you are uploading to.

To change the thumbnail on YouTube, for example, see:

https://youtu.be/5K4fbyl5Y3M?si=XslS6M4Q270cQ6qD


Vimeo, also allows you to set the display thumbnail after uploading the file. Not sure about the other social media sites as I don't upload to them.


MtD


MTD

Sep 9, 2024 3:00 AM in response to stephenpeterson

Editing custom movie poster frames or thumbnails works for me in Compressor and ffmpeg and Finder (Finder uses a different metadata for this, though).


But sharing or exporting such movies to other platforms and social media sites currently does not seem to always/never respect those poster frames and they usually grab the very 1st frame (that might be black) or some other frame from the start or middle of the movie as a poster frame.

Sep 9, 2024 8:12 AM in response to stephenpeterson

stephenpeterson wrote:

Still, stunning that this seemingly simple technological issue has not been adequately resolved.

Yes, sadly movie metadata is still a nonstandard mess. It is no wonder that little things like poster frames do not work when even dates and locations, and also descriptions, keywords etc are still a wild west with various companies pushing their own ideas. Image metadata is not perfect but much better.

Poster Frames/Thumbnail Generation

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