Creating Video Stills & Thumbnails

Images can help viewers to browse and locate your video. Images can also establish an identity for your content. In addition to your video content, you can include video stills and thumbnails in your Brightcove Players.

  • A video still is a static image that displays in the playback area before or after the video plays. All Players accept video stills.
  • A thumbnail is an image that displays with the short description in the Lineup area of some Brightcove Players and which promotes your content through public search engines and other promotional vehicles.

Most Brightcove-supplied Player templates can accommodate a video still and a thumbnail image for each Title. You can use the same image from your video for both the video still and thumbnail. Or, you can use an image from another source (such as a graphically-rendered promotional image) for one or both.

You will need:   Image capture & editing tools to prepare video stills and thumbnails.


To prepare high-quality images for use in your Brightcove Player:

  1. Obtain a source image using any of the following methods:
    • Export a video still (or frame) from your source full-length video using your video editing application.
    • Take a screenshot of your source video in a Player using an image capture tool.
    • Use an image from another source, such as a graphically rendered promotional image.
    • Use the Image Capture tool found in the Brightcove Console.
  2. Open the image in an image editing application.
  3. Crop the image to remove any extraneous information or unwanted blank space on the edges using the following guidelines:
    • Size - Use the following standard sizes to help Brightcove promote your content to a larger audience. For video stills: Crop to no less than 480x360 pixels. For thumbnails: Crop to no less than 120x90 pixels.
    • Aspect ratio - For thumbnails: Use a 4:3 aspect ratio. For video stills: Keep the same aspect ratio as the video they are derived from. This will generally be 4:3, unless you use a Player (Chromeless Single Title and Single Title Player) that supports scaling to arbitrary video sizes, in which case you can resize for 16:9. If your video has a 16:9 aspect ratio, but displays letterboxed in the player, your video should still use the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. (Resizing a Player for video with 16:9 aspect ratio).
  4. Deinterlace the image. Many image editing applications feature a deinterlacing filter to eliminate certain artifacts. (Adobe Photoshop users: Choose Filter > Video > Deinterlace > Interpolation and select Interpolation for the deinterlacing method.)


  5. Adjust the contrast and brightness to improve the image, as needed. (Most image editing applications can adjust color, brightness and contrast.)


  6. Resize the image by disabling “Constrain Proportions” or “Constrain Aspect Ratio” and entering the following height-by-width sizes:
    • For video stills: Scale to 480x360 pixels
    • For thumbnails: Scale to 120x90 pixels
  7. Save/Export the edited image. Use your application’s Save As or Export command to save a copy of your image as a non-progressive JPEG. (Adobe Photoshop users: The Save for Web option lets you preview the image before saving.)

    • Thumbnail JPEGs should be under 30K.
    • Video still JPEGS should be under 300K.

Creating Thumbnails and Video Stills using the Image Capture tool in the Brightcove Console:

  1. Select your FLV in the Assets tab or Titles tab.
  2. Click the Capture Image(s) button.
  3. A pop-up window will open and load the Console image capture tool.
  4. Pause your video on the frame you would like to capture as a Thumbnail or Video Still.
  5. Click the Camera icon in the bottom left of the pop-up window.
  6. To capture a Thumbnail of the chosen frame, edit the top text field to change the Asset name and make sure the checkbox is checked to save the image.
    • You can crop the thumbnail by clicking the sample Thumbnail to bring up the Crop Thumbnail feature. Then, you can drag around the transparent box to choose your cropping area. To resize the cropping area, use the slider at the bottom of the window. Drag the slider to the left to minimize the box or to the right to maximize the box. Once you have decided how you would like to crop your photo, click the Crop button. Your resulting image will show up as the sample Thumbnail.
  7. To capture a Video Still of the chosen frame, edit the bottom text field to change the Asset name and make sure the checkbox is checked to save the image.
  8. After you have selected the checkboxes of the images you'd like to save, click the Save button.
  9. The images will now appear in the Assets tab.

What’s next?