How to Loop a Video for YouTube
There are two ways to loop a video for YouTube, and they answer different questions. For playback, YouTube has a Loop setting in the player. For a clip that appears to repeat endlessly, the loop has to be built into the footage.
Loop a video for YouTube from the player
On a computer, go to the watch screen of any video, right click inside the video player, and click Loop. The video then repeats for that viewer until they stop it.
This changes nothing about your file, which is the point. It's a viewer preference, not a property of the video. Useful for background music, tutorials people are following along with, and anything meant to run while attention is elsewhere.
Building a loop that doesn't announce itself
The other kind of loop is craft, and it's decided before you press record. The last frame has to look like the first: same framing, same subject position, same lighting, same everything in the background. Then the cut has to land exactly on that point.
Drift of a few frames is enough. The eye is unforgiving about repetition specifically because it's expecting a match. The same clip cut sloppily reads as a mistake rather than as a loop.
Sound has its own version of this problem, and the Shorts tools have an answer for it: Adjust lets you select what part of a song plays in your Short. A loop wants a phrase that resolves where the picture hands back to the beginning, not a fragment that stops mid-bar.
No time limit on what you export
Montaj doesn't loop a clip. There's no repeat control, and no setting that duplicates a section for you.
What it doesn't do is get in the way: exports carry no time limit and no watermark, and it's free today, so if your approach is to lay the same clip down several times and export the whole run as one file, nothing about the export caps that or stamps a logo across the result. For a loop, where a watermark sitting in the same spot on every repetition is especially conspicuous, that's the relevant property. Everything else about how to loop a video for YouTube happens in the camera and at the cut point.
How to make a YouTube video repeat in 4 steps
- 1
Use the player's own Loop setting for playback
On a computer, go to the watch screen of any video, right click inside the video player, and click Loop. That repeats the video for the viewer without touching the file.
- 2
Design the loop point into the shot
A clean loop needs the last frame to resemble the first. Same framing, same position, same light. That's a filming decision, not an editing one.
- 3
Cut precisely on the repeat point
A few frames of drift is enough to register as a jump. This is where the loop is either seamless or obviously stitched.
- 4
Match the audio to the loop, not to the clip
In the Shorts tools, Adjust lets you select what part of a song plays in your Short. A loop wants a musical phrase that closes where the picture does.
The verdict
— Chloé, Senior Video Editor