Clip Thumbnails

Railcut displays thumbnail previews on video and image clips. This makes it easier to identify clips at a glance and find specific frames without scrubbing.

Enabling thumbnails

Go to → Settings → Cache and turn on Show Thumbnails. Thumbnails may be toggled off to reduce processing on large comps.

Thumbnails generate progressively as you work in the panel.

Tip

Thumbnail data is cached by source file. Once generated, thumbnails load instantly on subsequent opens, even across AE sessions.

Supported formats

Video files:

• .mp4, .mov, .mxf, .mkv, and most other common video containers

Still images:

• .png, .jpeg / .jpg

What doesn’t get thumbnails

These layer types don’t generate thumbnails:

• Precomps — frames are rendered internally by AE, not a source file
• Solids, text, shape, adjustment, null, camera, light — no video source

Cache management

Open → Settings → Cache to manage the thumbnail cache.

Controls:

• Show Thumbnails toggle
• Max thumbnail cache size — limits total disk space used by the thumbnail cache. When the limit is reached, older entries are pruned automatically.
• Clear All Thumbnail Cache — removes all cached thumbnail data

Clearing the cache only removes Railcut’s thumbnail data files; it has no effect on your AE project or source footage.

Thumbnail display

Thumbnails scale with the clip as you zoom in or out on the timeline. Zoom in to see more frames per clip.