Premiere Pro Tutorial: Setting Poster Frames

A quick change of your poster frame can help you better organize your editing workflow in a big way. Find out more in this Premiere Pro tutorial.

In Premiere Pro, the default poster frame (or thumbnail) for your clips is the first frame of your selected video. While this may work for some videos, usually the first frame is not a great indication of what is going on in the clip itself. This can result in wasted time spent searching for the right video when a quick thumbnail change could have prevented the entire mess. This is especially true when working with multiple editors.

The clips on the right are the same clips as the ones on the left, but with different poster images.

In this quick Premiere Pro tutorial, we’ll show you how to set the poster image from the default first frame to a frame of your choosing. Let’s begin:

1. Set the Project Panel to Icon View

By default, your project panel is probably in a list view, meaning all of your assets are listed without a thumbnail image. If you want to be able to see your poster frames, simply click the icon view button  at the bottom left hand corner of the panel. You should now be able to see a visual thumbnail of all your clips.

2. Find Your Desired Poster Frame

In the icon view, you can scrub through your video files two different ways. The first is to physically use your mouse to scrub over the video from left to right until you’ve found your desired frame. The other is by selecting the clip and hitting the spacebar. You can use the same playback controls as the preview monitor, so keyboard shortcuts like J,K, and L work as well. Once you find your desired frame, simply hit the spacebar to stop.

3. Right Click

With your desired poster frame selected, right click on the video thumbnail.

4. Set Poster Frame

In the dropdown menu, select Set Poster Frame. The current frame will now be your default thumbnail in the icon view.

A special thanks to RocketStock for providing the clips in this tutorial. Go check them out if you are looking for awesome After Effects templates. They also have a few After Effects freebies for your editing pleasure.

Want to learn quick tips in Premiere Pro? Check out a few of the following articles here on PremiumBeat:

• Quickly Applying Default Transitions in Premiere Pro
• Exporting Multiple Timelines in Adobe Premiere Pro
• Converting Stereo Tracks to Dual Mono in Premiere Pro

Have any other tips for staying organized in Premiere Pro? Share in the comments below.