The present invention provides a moving picture recording apparatus and method of recording moving picture signals as compression coded moving picture data together with reference moving picture data that references the moving picture data in a storage medium. Time data for designating a representative image of the moving picture data is designated, the representative image (poster frame) is read out and decoded, and a thumbnail image of the moving picture data is generated based on the representative image. The thumbnail image is encoded and written to a thumbnail file, and the representative image and corresponding thumbnail image recorded in the thumbnail file are correlated by a management file.