Making an effect look the same at the start and end?

[skinneyfat]

I'm wondering if there is any videos anyone knows of or any techniques you can share to make a mobile effect look the same at the end and the beginning? For instance, snowfall. I have a 30 second snowfall animation but you can clearly see it resetting itself. Now I'm not looking for a snowfall type of instruction per se. I'm just looking for general instruction on how it's done.

[Dave Merchant]

Some effects are easy to loop because their settings are directly controlled by keyframed parameters, so you can simply copy the start keyframe to the end (e.g. wipes, colorama).

More advanced effects and plugins that have a randomized element will sometimes include an option to make them loop-friendly, but it's not commonplace.

If all else fails, then you can split the effect clip, swap the two halves and blend them across the center transition - doing the same in time as you would do in space when creating a seamless texture in Photoshop. It can be difficult to find the best place to make the cuts, but if the effect truly has no repeating frames then it's your only choice.

[imeilfx]

As Dave said - there is several ways that you can achieeve seemless looping - everything depends on effects that you use or footage that you have.
As for looping something that can't be looped with effect settings you can also use that script: The LoopMaker - aescripts + aeplugins - aescripts.com  - in general that script does looping as Dave described in his last paragraph.

[skinneyfat]

Thank you. I literally just found this technique of splitting the video, I appreciate the responses.