Seamless loop
A clip whose last frame flows straight into its first, so it repeats forever with no visible jump or restart.
See it
What it is
A seamless loop is a clip whose last frame flows into its first so cleanly that a viewer cannot find the joint. Three ways to get there: cycle the math (every animated property completes a whole number of cycles over the clip, so a rotation lands on 360 degrees and a sine wave returns to phase zero); crossfade the seam (overlap the tail onto the head, dissolve, trim); or ping-pong it (play forward then reversed, cheap but obvious the moment anything moves in one direction, like walking or drifting smoke).
Reach for it on hero background video, ambient site loops, product turntables, and anything under an overlay where a restart flash would read as a bug. Keep loops short, 4 to 10 seconds, and keep the motion slow: the eye finds the repeat faster than you think when there is a distinctive gesture in frame.
Gotcha: the picture is only half of it. Exposure drift, a flickering light, and audio room tone all break a loop that looks fine frame to frame, so lock exposure and white balance on the shoot. Encoding bites too: put a keyframe on frame zero, keep the GOP short, and trim to an exact frame count, because a stray final frame or a slow seek back to the start is what produces that little hitch every playthrough.
Ask AI for it
Build a 6 second seamless loop at 1920x1080, 30fps. Render 180 unique frames numbered 0 to 179. Animate every element on a whole-cycle basis so the evaluated state at frame 180 equals frame 0, but do not include that duplicate endpoint in the export: rotations complete exactly 360 degrees, drifting elements travel exactly one tile width, and any noise or turbulence uses a looping evolution over the clip duration. No fade to black, no crossfade at the seam, no ping-pong reversal. Keep the motion slow and ambient with nothing that draws the eye to a single repeating gesture. Export H.264 with a keyframe on frame 0.