Cinemagraph maker

A cinemagraph is two layers. Underneath sits one still frame from your clip. Over it, inside the area you paint, the clip keeps playing and repeating. Everywhere you leave unpainted shows only the still frame, so a person, a building or a street stays perfectly fixed.

Because the frozen area never changes, the restart of the loop can only be seen inside the painted part. That makes the join much easier to hide than in a full-frame loop: a short crossfade over a patch of rippling water is almost impossible to spot, even when the rest of the scene had a car driving past.

For the same reason, the still frame and the moving area must come from a camera that stayed put. If the phone moved even slightly, the moving patch slides against its frozen surroundings and a seam appears along the edge of your painting.

Good candidates

• Running or rippling water: a stream, a fountain, a waterfall or waves in one corner of a beach scene.
• Steam and smoke rising from a drink, a pan or a chimney.
• Hair, scarves, flags and curtains moving in a breeze.
• Candle flames, a fireplace or fairy lights that flicker.
• Small repeating actions: a turning record, a ceiling fan, a ticking clock hand, rain on a window.

Harder cases

• Anything that crosses into the frozen area, such as a hand stirring a cup. The part outside your painting will snap back to the still frame and look cut off.
• Shadows and reflections. Ripples on water may throw moving light onto a frozen wall; paint that patch too, or it will flick on and off.
• Wind that moves the whole scene. If every leaf is moving, the frozen trees look odd; choose calmer footage or paint more of the frame.
• Lighting changes during the clip, which make the moving area brighten or darken against a still background.

• Paint a little beyond where the motion reaches. Steam spreads, flags flap wider in a gust, and anything that strays past your edge gets clipped.
• Start with a large Brush size to cover the bulk, then drop to a small brush and use Erase around the edges.
• For a scene where almost everything moves and one thing stands still, press Fill all and then erase the subject. A person frozen in the middle of a busy street is made this way.
• Play the loop several times while you paint. Look along the border of the painted area for objects cut in half or a flicker where motion meets stillness.
• Choose the still frame after you paint, not before. Step through with , and . to find a moment where the frozen parts look their best, then press Use the current frame.

The moving area still needs a good loop. Find the best loop compares whole frames, not only the painted part, so in a scene with lots of unrelated movement its rating can undersell how well your painted part loops. Run it as a starting point, then judge with Watch the join (J), which plays the moment the end meets the start.

Natural motion such as steam, flames and water rarely returns to exactly the same state, which is why this page starts with Crossfade. Give slow, drifting subjects a longer Crossfade length; keep it short for quick, regular motion so you do not see two layers at once. Blend is the alternative when the moving part almost matches already. The seamless loop video page compares the three joins in detail.

Short loops suit cinemagraphs. Two to six seconds of repeating motion is usually plenty, and it keeps GIF and WebP files small.

• MP4 plays on every phone, computer and social app, can keep the clip’s sound or carry your own music, and can repeat for as long as you like, up to three hours.
• GIF plays almost anywhere and loops by itself, but it is limited to 256 colours, has no sound and holds one pass of the loop, at most 30 seconds. Choose Width and Frame rate to control the size.
• WebP is an animated image that is smaller and sharper than a GIF with the same lack of sound and the same 30-second limit. It can be exported in Chrome, Edge and Firefox but not in Safari.

For an Instagram post or Reel, export MP4 and set Shape to 4:5 or 9:16 under More options; the Instagram loop video page covers the sizes. For a website header or an email, a GIF or WebP is usually easier to drop in.