In one of the earlier Quicktips I showed scrubbing through clips in a Final Cut Pro bin via the Thumbnail bin column. In Avid Media Composer there’s a tab at the top of the bin marked Frame. That’s a quick way to view Avid clip thumbnails in a bin. Plus you can playback and JKL scrub the clips as well.

First click to the Frame tab in a Media Composer bin. If the thumbnails are too small select them all and hit command + L to make the thumbnails larger. Keep hitting command + L and they’ll keep scaling up to larger and larger thumbs. To reduce the size hit command + K.

When you have the thumbnails at the right size you can then playback any of those thumbs by single clicking on a clip in that bin and hitting play. This thumbnail playback also supports JLK scrubbing. When you hit K to stop playback that frame is updated as the poster frame for the clip. As a bonus, and this is part of what makes this really useful, the clip that you are previewing with this method will be displayed out of your I/O device on a client monitor.

See the video embedded below for this tip in action: