Cover image for a Video

[Ana23002957zfhc]

Greetings everyone!

I'm new to After Effects and I'm trying without success to create a cover for a video I'm editing.

What I need to do is to choose a particular point in the video (ex: at 8seconds in) to be shown when the video is not playing. I've set "Poster Time" on the frame I need, but after rendering the frame shown is a random one, not even the first frame in the video.

Hope someone can help me!

Thanks

[Mylenium]

This is not possible. The only format that ever allowed to define a custom poster frame/ thumbnail image were some old Quicktime formats. Otherwise this is entirely determined by the preview functions of the operating systems and media players or like on YouTube uploading a still image. These days the poster frame only has relevance for AE's project window, but pretty much they could be removing this function and nobody would miss it.

Mylenium

[ShiveringCactus]

If you're doing this for a website (your use of the term "poster" makes me think you are) then it's not achieved in After Effects but in the HTML embed code:

<video controls poster="poster.png">
  <source src="movie.mp4" type="video/mp4">
  Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

You can either render a frame out using Composition > Save Frame As...  or you can install FX Console from Video Copilot which includes a frame grabber.