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[RSleith]

Sorry if I'm buggering the terminology; I'm not clear on the difference between one and the other.

I ripped a series of Great Courses lectures. I imported them as Media Subtype=TV series so they would display as Lecture 1, Lecture 2, etc., just as one would do with a S1E1 type of naming convention. The default behavior for creating "thumbnails" seems to be to select the first frame with text. This is perfect for lecture 2 and onwards. I have thumbnails of the form Lecture Number - Lecture Title. Perfect.

The problem is with Lecture 1, which includes a prologue to the actual title frame; thus the "thumbnail" is created from a frame that is not the lecture title. If I try to change the "cover art" for that episode by Cover Art->copy for clipboard, the image I paste is then applied to entire series.

How can I modify the thumbnail for Lecture 1 without affecting all the others?

Thanks!

[fitbrit]

Your premise that MC chooses the first frame with text for the thumbnail is incorrect; it's actually done at a fixed time after the start of the file. You can change this number in options somewhere. However, in the majoirity of your lecture videos, the default is working very well (by coincidence). What you need to do for your rogue lecture is to:

Play the video.
Pause at the frame you wish to use as thumbnail.
Right click and search the options - there should be one to use screengrab as thumbnail.

You may have to use Red October Standard for the option to appear. If it doesn't work, you can go to options and change the default thumbnail creation time to suit the lecture that's inconsistent with the others.
Then select the video in standard view: right click> Cover Art> Rebuild thumbnail.

Once you have it right, don't forget to reset the default time that thumbnails are created at if that's important to you.

[RSleith]

Great, that worked for getting the correct thumbnail for episode 1.

Now (here is where my confusion over Cover Art versus Thumbnails becomes apparent...)...

How do I apply Cover Art to the series? To clarify what I am asking, let's work backwards from what I see in Theater View. When I select the series, I see a list of episodes, each with the thumbnail as described previously. However, when I back up a level and see all series displayed, the image I see with the Great Course series is the thumbnail I created for Lecture 1. 

I then tried selecting all the episodes in the series, right click->Cover Art->Add from file and the image I select for cover art is then used for each of the thumbnails.

[fitbrit]

Yeah, this is confusing me a little too. The problem, I believe is that series cover art is downloaded from TVDB.com. What you can do -untested by me- is to go into your TV Series cover art folder (not sure where it is exactly, but it should be findable in other threads definitely).
Take a look at the naming convention of the series, and then name the series cover art file you want for your lectures according to that convention. Place it in the series cover art folder, cross your fingers and tell us if it worked or not.
Good luck.

[RSleith]

... tell us if it worked or not.

Like a charm. Thanks!!

[fitbrit]

Thanks for reporting back. I may end up doing this too.

[maid]

Instead of a clip from the show can we make it the cover of the series???

[fitbrit]

Instead of a clip from the show can we make it the cover of the series???

That was always how I preferred to do things. I think you can still do it, but manually like we used to have to before.