2 Ways to Loop a Video in Premiere Pro: Step-by-Step Guide

Adobe Premiere Pro is one of the most versatile and widely used video editing tools, offering countless features for professional and amateur editors alike.

Among these features is the ability to loop a video—a technique that can serve various creative and practical purposes.

Whether you want to create seamless loops for social media, generate background visuals for an event, or enhance a larger video project, looping a video in Premiere Pro can be both simple and effective.

This guide will walk you through the process step by step, covering why you might need to loop a video and how to achieve it.

Let's get into it.

Why Loop a Video?

There are multiple reasons to loop a video, and if you're a social media user, chances are you've encountered numerous looped videos while browsing.

Sometimes, this is done to showcase only one part of a video where something important happens, and it's easy to miss it as it's only a few seconds. Other times, it serves a completely different purpose, like pure hypnotic entertainment, such as in the artistic loops in visualizer music videos, or to showcase an animated logo that transforms and changes shapes.

Here are the most popular use cases and reasons editors decide to loop videos:

• Enhancing Visual Appeal

  Looping videos can be a creative way to produce captivating and visually engaging content. For instance, looping a short animation or a mesmerizing time-lapse can create a hypnotic effect that grabs the viewer’s attention.

  This is particularly useful for platforms like Instagram, YouTube shorts, or TikTok, where seamless loops can make a video more shareable. Given the importance of such platforms nowadays for various things, including advertising and growing your brand, we should not ignore the methods that are optimal for gaining engagement on them.

• Creating Backgrounds

  Instead of filming or editing lengthy footage, looping allows you to use shorter clips efficiently. By repeating a single clip, you can extend its duration without needing additional material, saving time and storage space.

  Looped videos are often used as backgrounds for events, websites, or presentations. Whether it’s a calming ocean wave, a dynamic animation, or a glowing abstract design, a looped video ensures a consistent visual presence without requiring excessive editing or large file sizes.

  

  During presentations, cocktail parties, promos, and similar gatherings, it's almost always possible to see a looped video in the background being screened on a canvas, either with the company logo, a showcase of a product, drone footage showing a real estate project, etc.

• Applications in Different Industries

  From advertising to entertainment, looping videos have diverse applications. In advertisements, they can reinforce a brand message with recurring visuals. In music videos or live performances, they add atmospheric layers. Social media users also use loops to keep content concise yet engaging.

  No matter the purpose, we believe an editor needs to know how to loop a video clip as it's one of the most frequently requested tasks. So, take a look at the section below where we explain how to loop a video in Premiere Pro using the software's built-in tools.

Loop a Video in Premiere Pro

If you've never created a video loop in Adobe Premiere Pro before, simply follow these steps, and you'll have the same clip looping for as long as you want in just a few minutes.

Here's how:

Recording with the Loop in Mind

Before we get into looping mode for your video file, you must keep in mind that a perfect loop is mostly created during the recording, and here's why:

If you're the one recording the clip that needs to loop, it helps a lot when you remove the need to make the looping unnoticeable using video transitions and instead make the clip as "naturally loopable" as you can.

For example, if you're recording a person in a room explaining something, and at the start of the clip, he's in the middle of the room but then moves across it and at the end comes back in the middle again, it's going to be much easier to loop that video. If the person ends up on the opposite side of where he started, when the loop transitions plays, he will be "teleported" to the center of the room and it will be very noticeable and "rough".

This is not "wrong" per se, but if you want to create impressive loops, you need to keep these things in mind.

The same applies to monologue/dialogue if you have that in your video. The last word the person says in your clip should be something that connects to the first word they say in the clip for an even more seamless transition, and make it look as if the person never ended their sentence or stopped speaking.

• Step 1: Set Up Your Premiere Pro Project

  1. Open Adobe Premiere Pro and create a new project. This is done by selecting File > New Project on the very first home screen. Name your project and specify the location where you want to save it.
  2. Import your video by selecting File > Import, dragging the file directly into the Project Panel, or heading to the "Project" panel and clicking the "Import media" button.
  3. Drag the video from the Project Panel to the Timeline to create a new sequence. Premiere Pro will automatically match the sequence settings to your video’s resolution and frame rate.

• Step 2: Prepare the Clip for Looping

  Before looping, ensure the video clip is trimmed and edited as needed. Use the Razor Tool or Ctrl + K (Cmd + K on Mac) to cut unwanted sections.

  Adjust the clip’s speed or duration if necessary using the Speed/Duration option by right-clicking the clip.

  

• Step 3: Duplicate the Clip for Looping

  1. Select the clip in the Timeline by clicking on it.
  2. Copy the clip by pressing Ctrl + C (Cmd + C on Mac).
  3. Move the playhead to the end of the clip, ensuring there are no gaps.
  4. Paste the clip by pressing Ctrl + V (Cmd + V on Mac). This will create a duplicate of the original clip immediately after it.
  5. Repeat this process as many times as needed to achieve the desired loop duration. You can also select multiple clips, copy them, and paste them in bulk to speed up the process.

• Step 4: Seamless Transition Check

  After duplicating the clip, ensure the transition between the end of one clip and the start of the next is seamless. Play the sequence to check for any noticeable jumps or inconsistencies. If there is a visible disruption:

  • Use the Cross Dissolve effect from the Effects Panel to smooth the transition between the two clips.
  • Adjust the trimming of the clips to match frames better.

• Step 5: Using Nested Sequences for a Longer Video Loop

  If you’re working with a large number of duplicates, nesting the clips can simplify your workflow:

  1. Select all the duplicated clips in the Timeline.
  2. Right-click and choose Nest from the context menu.
  3. Name the nested sequence and click OK. The nested sequence now behaves like a single clip, which can be duplicated for additional loops.

• Step 6: Export the Looped Video

  1. Once satisfied with the loop, ensure the sequence timeline covers the full duration of the looped clips.
  2. Go to File > Export > Media or press Ctrl + M (Cmd + M on Mac) to open the export settings.
  3. Choose the appropriate format and preset, such as H.264 > Match Source - High Bitrate for most use cases.
  4. Specify the file name and save location.
  5. Click Export to render the looped video.

How to Loop a Video in Premiere Pro with BCC Looper

Despite Adobe Premiere Pro being such a versatile tool, some plug-ins are simply made for a specific task, and they make accomplishing that task much quicker and easier compared to using a software's built-in features.

Speaking of specialized tools, Continuum's creator pack contains hundreds of various presets, filters, transitions, tools, and everything else you may need for all video editing and video production tasks.

You can download a free version of Continuum and try all the tools it offers before deciding to upgrade. The free version allows you to use everything, but your content will be watermarked until you purchase a license.

Continuum is compatible with all popular video editing programs on the market, so you can use it not only in Premiere Pro but in After Effects, Avid, DaVinci Resolve, VEGAS Pro, and many other programs as well.

Within Continuum, there's a tool called BCC Looper, and here's how to use it for this specific task: creating a loop.

• Step 1: Create a New Project, Import Media, and Create a Timeline

  Just like we showed you in the previous section, you first need to launch your software of choice, create a new project, import all the clips you want to use for the loop, and then create a timeline by dragging them to the timeline area.

• Step 2: Apply the BCC Looper Effect to Your Video

  Once your video is placed on the timeline, open the "Effects" panel and use the search bar to find the BCC Looper effect.

  Drag and drop the effect onto the first clip on your timeline.

  

• Step 3: Access the Effect Controls Panel

  Now that you have BCC Looper applied to a clip on your timeline, you need to access the "Effect Controls" panel, which is like a menu bar for all features a tool has to offer after you apply it to a video clip in your timeline.

  

  Once you're in the Effect Controls panel, you can find BCC Looper on the list and all of its settings. From here, using this tool is very simple.

  The "Start Frame" parameter will make your video loop start from the frame you tell it to, so if you set it to 1, the loop will start from the first frame of the video you applied the effect to, meaning from the very beginning.

  The "Loop Length" is for how long you want the video to last before it starts anew from the start frame you chose, meaning if you put a value of 30, it will last for thirty frames before looping.

  If you want the whole loop to last longer than the length of the original video you applied the effect to, simply create a black video slug, place it on the timeline above your original video, and set its duration to as long as you want.

  

  Then, apply the BCC Looper to it instead of the original video. In the Effect Controls panel, set the "Loop Layer" setting to the video track on which the original video is set, in our case, "Video Track 1" or just "V1," as shown in the image below.

  

  For more information on what all of the settings available do, take a look at the official BCC Looper info webpage.

Final Words

That covers everything you need to know about looping a video in Premiere Pro, both using the built-in tools and a specialized plug-in made specifically for this task.

Hopefully, this will help you with all future work.

We wish you the best of luck, and thank you for reading!