Make a loop video for Instagram

Instagram already does the repeating: when a Reel ends, it starts again. A file containing five passes only makes a longer Reel in which the same moment visibly comes round again and again. A single pass with a join nobody can find gives the same endless effect at a fraction of the length.

Because people who keep watching see the join on every replay, the join matters more than almost anything else in the clip. The usual causes of a visible restart are a camera that drifted, light that changed, or a subject in a different place at the end. Find the best loop looks for the pair of frames that match most closely, and rates the result from Excellent match to Poor match. A Crossfade hides a remaining difference; Blend softens a small jump without making the clip shorter. For the theory of loop points, see seamless loop video.

Instagram’s Help Centre says Reels can be uploaded at aspect ratios between 1.91:1 and 9:16. Vertical 9:16 is the one that fills a phone screen, so it is the natural choice for both Reels and Stories.

For a regular feed post, 4:5 portrait takes up more of the screen than a square or a landscape video as people scroll. Reels can also appear cropped to a smaller frame elsewhere in the app, such as on your profile grid, so it pays to keep the subject near the centre whatever shape you export.

• Shape crops the video; it never stretches or adds bars. Turning landscape footage into 9:16 keeps only a narrow vertical slice of the frame, so check what survives.
• Drag the preview, or use Position, to choose which part of the frame stays.
• If you film with Instagram in mind, holding the phone upright avoids heavy cropping later.

A Story moves on to the next one when the video ends. A two-second loop is over before most people have registered it, so repeat it before posting.

• Number of times with ×3 or ×5 turns a two-second loop into six or ten seconds.
• Length set to 30 s repeats it for exactly 30 seconds, cutting the final pass to fit.
• With a Crossfade, each pass is shorter by the crossfade length, so allow a little extra if you are counting seconds.

The same approach works for any clip that is too short for where you want to post it; make a video longer covers it in more detail.

Instagram lays its own interface over Reels and Stories: your name and the caption near the bottom, buttons down the side, and a progress bar along the top of Stories. Meta’s guidance for Reels advertisers is to keep text and logos away from the top and bottom edges, and the same advice suits ordinary posts.

Practical framing

• Keep faces and any text burned into the footage in the middle of the frame.
• Leave the lower part of the frame free of detail people need to read.
• loop.video doesn’t add text or stickers, so add captions in Instagram’s own editor, where you can see the overlays as you place them.