Thumbnail Display Issues

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Sometimes thumbnail images won't display, other times get "stuck" on an incorrect image, or are constantly needing to re-draw, either in the Thumbnail column in the Browser or in the Timeline.

Updating Incorrect Thumbnails

One of the most common problems are thumbnail images that display a "Media Offline" warning even after reconnecting media. Below is one example.

To clear up thumbnail issues, similar to audio waveform issues, the first things to try are:

1. Quitting and re-starting Final Cut Pro.

2. Repair permissions as outlined earlier.

3. If the cache files are stored on a different drive from your main hard drive, check that "ignore ownership on this volume" is checked, found in the article Hard Drive Privileges.

If the above options don't clear up the problem, try trashing existing thumbnail cache files on your hard drive (as detailed below). This won't cause any playback issues. As soon as you choose to display thumbnails in the Timeline, Final Cut Pro will re-create the thumbnail iamge. To throw away thumbnail cache files:

1. In Final Cut Pro, go to the Final Cut Pro menu > System Settings. On this page you will see the location where Waveform Cache and Thumbnail Cache files are stored.

2. Quit Final Cut Pro.

3. Navigate to folder where the thumbnail cache files are stored. There will be two files in this folder.

4. Delete both files in the folder (but not the folder itself).

The files will be re-generated by Final Cut Pro automatically as necessary.

Changing Cache Settings For Thumbnails

Sometimes you're thumbnail caches aren't allocated high enough, and Final Cut Pro is constantly re-drawing thumbnails that it has previously drawn. Or in a large Timeline Final Cut Pro may not draw all the thumbnails for each clip. This can be fixed by setting higher cache settings.

1. In Final Cut Pro, go to the Final Cut Pro menu > System Settings.

2. Click on the Memory & Cache tab.

3. Under Thumbnail Cache options, set disk and RAM cache to higher amounts. A little experimentation is needed. But these are pretty small numbers to begin with, so don't worry about upping these settings to at least twice their defaults for a starting point.