How to loop a video in Premiere Pro

Loop playback repeats a stretch of the sequence over and over so you can adjust an effect, a colour correction or the audio level and see the change at once, without pressing play again. It is a viewing aid for the editor, not an edit.

1. Move the playhead to the first frame of the stretch you want to watch and press I (Mark In).
2. Move to the last frame and press O (Mark Out).
3. Click the Loop icon in the Program Monitor’s button bar.
4. Press Space or L to start playback. It runs from In to Out and back again until you press Space or K.

If there is no Loop icon under the monitor, click the Button Editor (the + icon at the bottom right of the monitor) and drag the Loop Playback button into the bar. The Source Monitor has the same control for looping a clip before it goes into a sequence.

Because the setting belongs to the monitor, turning it on has no effect on what you export. A sequence that contains one copy of a clip exports as one copy, however many times you watched it loop.

Pasting copies one by one is fine for a few repeats. For dozens, a nested sequence keeps the timeline tidy and makes changes painless.

1. Build a short block of repeats, for example ten copies of the clip with their joins already dissolved.
2. Select all of them, right-click and choose Nest. Premiere Pro moves the clips into a new sequence and puts that sequence back in their place as a single clip.
3. Copy and paste the nested clip end to end. Ten nested clips of ten repeats give you a hundred repeats in ten pastes.

Changes you make inside the nested sequence, such as a colour grade or a tighter trim, update every instance at once. Adobe notes two catches: nested sequences can take longer to process, and if you shorten the source sequence, the nested clips keep their old length and fill the difference with black video and silence, which you then need to trim off.

Doing the maths before you start

Work out the count first. A 6-second clip needs 10 repeats for a minute, 100 for 10 minutes and 600 for an hour. If you are aiming at an exact running time, check the sequence duration at the end and trim the last copy to hit it.

Even a well-chosen loop can show a small jump where the last frame meets the first. A short dissolve hides it by blending the end of one copy into the start of the next.

• Apply to every join at once: select all the copies and choose Sequence → Apply Default Transitions to Selection. Cross Dissolve and Constant Power Crossfade are the default video and audio transitions, so the picture and the sound both blend.
• Set the length first: the default is set under Edit → Preferences → Timeline on Windows, or Premiere → Settings → Timeline on macOS. A dissolve of a few frames to half a second keeps the loop feeling continuous.
• Leave footage past each cut: a dissolve needs frames beyond the edit point to blend. If you used the whole source clip untrimmed, trim a little off each end before you start copying.
• Drag a transition handle: in recent versions you can also drag the transition handle at the edge of a clip in the timeline to add the default transition and set its length visually.

If the footage never comes back to where it started, a dissolve turns a jump into a visible fade. The guide to a seamless loop video explains how to pick start and end points that match.

Premiere Pro exports the whole length of the sequence, so an hour of repeats is an hour-long export job, and the time it takes depends on your computer and settings. A few choices keep it manageable.

• Use File → Export → Media, choose H.264 for an MP4 and start from Match Source – Adaptive High Bitrate, which Adobe suggests for a quick, high-quality export.
• Click Send to Adobe Media Encoder instead of Export to render in the background while you keep working. Media Encoder adds the export to its queue; press Start Queue to begin.
• Look at the estimated file size in Export mode before you start. An hour of 1080p video at a typical bitrate runs to several gigabytes, so make sure the destination drive has room.
• If you only need the loop for a website background, a few seconds exported once and looped by the page is far smaller than a long file; see background video loops.

When the job is a clip repeated for minutes or hours, a dedicated looper saves the timeline work. loop.video runs in the browser, is free, adds no watermark and never uploads the video.

• Click Select video, then drag Loop start and Loop end or press Find the best loop to choose the section with the smallest jump.
• Under Join, pick Cut, Crossfade (with a Crossfade length slider) or Blend to soften a small jump without changing the length.
• Under Repeat, choose Length and pick 10 min, 30 min, 1 hour or a Custom length up to 3:00:00, or set a Number of times.
• Click Export video and then Download video, and import the MP4 into Premiere Pro like any other clip.

The loop is encoded once and its compressed frames are written again for each repeat, so an hour of a short loop takes about as long as encoding the loop plus writing the file. With a Cut join, the original shape and size, Standard quality and a start on a key frame, the original frames are copied with no re-encoding. It does not grade colour, add titles or work on a multi-track sequence; it loops one clip, up to three hours. The one-hour loop page explains file sizes in more detail.