What makes a loop seamless
A loop is seamless when frame N+1 would equal frame 1. Every moving element must complete a whole number of cycles in the loop duration: a rotation of exactly 360°, a pan that moves exactly one tile width, a noise field that is sampled on a circle. If any element has a period that does not divide the loop length, you will see a "pop" at the cut.
Free sources
- Make your own with our looping background maker: grid, bokeh, waves and snow, recorded as WebM.
- Public-domain and CC0 stock sites (Pexels, Pixabay, Mixkit) have "loop" categories. Check that clips are truly cyclic, as many are just long and slow.
- NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio publishes Earth rotations that are perfect for globe backgrounds, with credit.
Making loops in After Effects or Blender
- Pick a loop length (8–20 s works for backgrounds) and calculate every speed from it.
- In After Effects use
loopOut("cycle")on keyframed properties, and Fractal Noise with "Cycle Evolution" enabled. - In Blender drive rotations with
frame / frame_end * 2 * piand use the Cycles modifier on F-curves. - Render one extra frame and delete it, so the first frame is not duplicated.
Encoding
| Use | Codec | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Live switching (vMix, OBS) | H.264 high bitrate or WebM VP9 | Hardware decode, small files |
| Editing / grading | ProRes 422 HQ or DNxHR HQ | No generational loss |
| LED wall media server | HAP or NotchLC | GPU decode at large resolutions |
Looking for the old animated Christmas backdrop? Its successor is the snowfall preset in the loop maker.