Looping from a specific point in timeline - After effects

[val B]

Hi,

I would like to make a social media GIF. I would like my earth to rotate continuously and after 1 sec a heart to appear and scale up and down, beating. The heart appears from the side of the earth.
I don't want the GIF to repeat from the beginning each time, just play once, heart appears and loop the heart beating. Is there a way of playing the beginning 1x and looping the end continously?
So I guess it's given playing  the begnning 1x and loop the from mid timeline to the end continuously.

Any help would bne great. Thank you.

[Dan Ebberts]

It sounds like maybe you'd want to use time remapping with a loopOutDuration("cycle", dur) expression, where dur would be the time, in seconds that you want to loop at the end.

[Mylenium]

GIFs can't work this way. While Dan's advice would be appropriate for regualr animation, a GIF's play behavior cannot be controlled in any such fashion. It always loops from the start. Hence what you intend to do requires a completely different approach like actually having two GIFs - one with the slide-in animation and a second with the end loop. This of course requires you to mess with the actual HTML code in order to create a load event that swaps the images on the fly. Likewise, you could create an interactive SVG or use HTML canvas, but at any rate this goes beyond what you can do in AE. Either that or you just accept that the GIF loops again and again in full.

Mylenium

[Mrtn Ritter]

Agree!

Now just think of a slide-out animation - can be as easy as your animation in backwards - and your gif will loop neatless. This is not exactly what you want, but still better as a looping GIF with a jump/cut in the loop.

*Martin