How to Loop Videos in After Effects

After Effects makes looping your videos simple and easy! After Effects is a compositing and motion graphics program offering many more looping options than regular video editing apps. This includes expressions, recompositions, duplication, and time remapping. It also allows for precise trimming and timing adjustments to ensure a perfect loop.

Looped videos offer several benefits to social media. For one, they can add to repeat viewings, which will easily increase the view count on your content! They can also create a hypnotic or meditative effect that enhances the viewer’s experience and engagement.

Ready to create some looped videos? We’ll take a look at easy ways you can loop live-action footage and animation in After Effects.

There are many different ways you can loop live-action footage in After Effects. We are going to cover the simplest, which is looping a video with a “hard cut.” This essentially allows the video to repeat and play all over again. You can expand on this to make a seamless loop, which we will cover later on.

One benefit of creating a looped video is that some social media apps may require a video to be a certain length. For example, the minimum length for a video might be 15 seconds. But your video is only 8 seconds long. So by looping your 8-second video, you’ll have a 16-second video! So follow these steps to loop your live-action footage in After Effects.

First, select your video clip in After Effects and add it to a new composition. You can easily do this by clicking on your footage in the Project panel, and then dragging and dropping the clip on the Composition icon at the bottom. This will create a new composition based on the specs of your video clip.

Right now, the composition length is the exact length of our video clip. We need to increase it, so our existing video clip can loop. You’ll need to increase the length to double the length (or more if you want to loop your video more than once). Navigate to Composition > Composition Settings. Set the Duration to be double what it is currently set to. With my example clip, the Duration is 10 seconds long. So I need to set it to 20 seconds. Once you have it set, click OK.

Now we need to duplicate our video. In the composition timeline, select the video layer and press Control-D (Windows) or Command-D (Mac). This will create an exact copy of the layer, which can then be offset to create a looped sequence. Click and drag the duplicated copy of your video over to perfectly align with the end of the original video clip. Now you have successfully looped your video clip!

If you are ready to export your video, you can skip ahead to that section of the article.

It is important to understand that depending on your footage, the video loop we just created will most likely not be a seamless loop. In order to create a seamless loop with live-action footage, you will need the last frame of your video to match the first frame of your video. There are many ways to do this, but one of the easiest is just to have your camera locked down on a tripod, have your subject walk into the frame at the beginning, and walk off the frame at the end. This will allow for a seamless loop because the beginning and end frames are essentially the same (as long as there isn’t any distracting movement going on in the background).

Other ways you can seamlessly loop live-action footage include doing a crossfade so that the end of the video fades into the beginning of the video. Alternatively, you can just have an image logo appear at the beginning and the end of your video or something as simple as fading from black at the start and fading out to black at the end of the video. These will all help to create a seamless loop.

There are a few different ways you can loop animations in After Effects. Let’s start with how you can loop a keyframe animation going on within your video (as opposed to looping the entire video animation).

To loop a keyframed animation in After Effects, we must first create an animation. In our case, let’s keyframe rotate some text 360° degrees. Add some text to your composition, and then make the text a 3D layer. Now set a keyframe for the Y Rotation at 0 and another keyframe later on for 1x rotation.

Then Alt-Click on the keyframe stopwatch (Option-Click if you are on a Mac). Then type the expression loopOut().

This will add the loop-out expression, and when you play back your animation, it should now continue to loop!

If you would like to loop an entire video animation, it resembles how we looped our live-action footage earlier. You can repeat that process of duplicating the animation composition and aligning them up back to back. However, there is another method you can try that uses time remapping. First, add your precomposed animation into a new composition. Ensure the new composition duration is long enough to give your animation plenty of time to loop.

Right-click on your animation layer and navigate to Time > Enable Time Remapping.

Then Alt-Click on the Time Remapping stopwatch and type in the loopOut() expression.

Now highlight the end of your animation composition and drag the end of it out to increase the length of the composition.

Now when you play the animation back, it should continue to loop!

1. Trim the video composition to the desired length (if needed) and then select the composition in the Project panel by clicking on it.

2. Click on Composition > Add to Render Queue.

3. In the Render Queue panel, select the desired output module and format.

4. Click on Output To and select the destination folder and file name.

5. Click on Render to start exporting the looped video.

6. Check the exported video to ensure it loops seamlessly.

To loop animation in After Effects, first, create the keyframed animation and trim it to the desired length. Then, Alt-click on the stopwatch for the keyframed animation and use the loopOut() expression to create a seamless loop. Alternatively, you can duplicate the animated layer and offset it by the length of the animation to create a looped sequence.

To create a seamless loop in After Effects, you will need to use one of the looping methods outlined above, and you will need to ensure that the beginning frame and ending frames of your video are the same. This creates a seamless loop, unlike a standard looping video that repeats itself.

Exporting a looped video is just like exporting any other video from After Effects. Trim your composition to the end where you would like the loop to end. Then, click on Composition > Add to Render Queue and select the desired output module and format. Finally, click on Render to start exporting the looped video.

You should now have everything you need to start looping videos in After Effects! While you’re here, check out this great article on After Effects vs. Premiere Pro, as well as the Top 10 After Effects Tutorials for Beginners and these Top 10 After Effects Templates.

And if you want to download useful templates for After Effects, head to Envato Elements and browse the massive selection on offer there.