Create a thumbnail and preview option in the project panel. Save hundreds of production hours.

[chriskh]

Hello,

We use AE constantly, like everyone here. One universal feature that is both quality of life, and a productivity enhancer, would be to implement a thumbnail view in the project panel. When animators create complex projects with many source files, being forced to scan through them one at a time as a text list item and seeing a slow-to-render small thumbnail of a single image is extremely inefficient for the user. I have here a screen grab from a piece of software that was last updated back in 2022 called aeviewer. This does achieve the general UI functionality we desire for AE, the only problem is, this does NOT allow this view for files that are INSIDE your AE project. This script is essentially a replacement for adobe bridge, or something of that nature. It allows you to scan your harddrive, and double click to import the file you find and want to use into your AE project. This is also a problematic workflow in that it creates a new aefinder folder, and deposits imports there. As is often the case, I have already optimized and imported many images, organized by folder and subfolder, in my project panel. With this quantity of imagery and video sources, the amount of cumulative hours spent trying to search through the assets is large, and added up over a year, is even larger. No matter how great your memory, recalling what image 152 out of 300 isn't likely. I've included a screengrab with some content blurred/ blocked to show the basics of the UI, which is a decent starting point with hover previews on videos and audio which is a nice touch. By implementing a project panel thumbnail feature, you will free creators to move more intuitively through their content and pull the assets that are perfect for the scene, whereas before time constraints or other limitations my force the editors hand. We simply don't have the time to dig through 297 files named revision-7-1 from the client. The top level, most immediately visual solution to this that will give a robust improvement regardless of the pre-pro workflow or asset condition, would be a visual project panel thumnbail system. Thank you! Keep creating.

[Warren Heaton]

There was a similar feature request for Premiere Pro type thumbnails with Premiere Pro's Hover Scrub and Freeform mode back on the Adobe User Voice.   I think it only got a handful of votes and never migrated over.  Hopefully this time around more users vote for this.

I often create a Comp called "Contact Sheet" that contains the containing (or parent) Comps with the corresponding Layers tiled in a grid (and usually scaled to about 25%) for quick, top-level review.