1. Gather The Loopies

I've been using a mixture of my personal work & downloading other's from GIPHY, Instagram, Behance, Youtube, & Vimeo. Vimeo/Youtube have higher quality renditions available usually, followed by Behance, followed by GIPHY/Instagram (usually).

Go to the Bonuses page to download some of the Loops I'm using.

Use any site that lets you scrape stuff (for Reddit, Vimeo, Youtube, etc)

• Youtube: https://www.y2mate.com/
• Vimeo/Facebook/Instagram: http://savevideo.me/
• Reddit: https://viddit.red/
• On GIPHY, add /renditions to the URL ;)

I find its easiest to do these steps in larger batches, depending on how many loops you want on it.

2. Resize & Trim in After Effects

These steps are only necessary if you care about your videos being sized properly, or if using portrait orientation, which you totally should. If you already know how to use After Effects, just go through your own motions to size all of your videos to match the screen dimensions (1280 x 800).

1. Drag your files into After Effects' project tab.

2. Select all of the source clips, right click & create a composition. Make sure "Multiple compositions" is selected & then click Ok.

3. Hit CMD+K to open composition settings. Change the composition size to 1280 width & 800 height (or whatever your particular screen's dimensions are). I also recommend changing the background color to red or something obnoxious, so it's more obvious when things aren't perfect. Click OK.

4. Adjust scale to fill the composition. I've found that up to 200% scale looks fine on this display, especially for GIFs. 250% is pushing it, & anything higher you'll want to find a higher res clip for.

   <aside> 🎨 Depending on the loop's background, you can add a color matte behind it to avoid having to scale up too much.

   If the loop doesn't have a solid background, a color matte doesn't look great, and the loop has some padding around its center of focus, you can duplicate the video twice, rotate 180 degrees, & drag above/below the main loop

   </aside>

5. If screen is in portrait mode, rotate all your clips -90 degrees

   • I'm rlly sorry about the neck pain from turning your head to preview what it'll look like on your screen. I'm sure you could also just set up the screen in portrait mode, instead of landscape mode rotated on its side. I didn't do that though. Be smarter than me.

6. Make sure that the timeline doesn't leave any empty frames at the end – sometimes when importing GIFs, there will be an extra frame at the end that'll be noticeable if looping

Making the comps

Adjusting to fit ur screen

3. Render Loops to Adobe Media Encoder

1. In After Effects, select all of your prepared compositions from AE's project tab (just the compositions – don't select mp4's). In the menu bar, click file & then Export -> Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. AME should now open and after a little bit your compositions will load in to the queue*.* You could also just render normally thru After Effects, but I prefer AME because everything is a more decent size by default.
2. Select all renders (if multiple) with cmd + a & then click Match Source - High Bitrate to enter export settings. Click Ok if the multiple files warning appears
3. If selected, uncheck Include Audio. Even if your clips don't have audio, not checking this box sometimes adds an extra frame to the end, which can be a noticeably stutter when looping. I don't make the rules
4. Click OK
5. The column furthest to the right (Output File) in the queue is where it'll be exported to. I recommend (with everything selected) changing this to your desktop to make the next step easier
6. Click the green play icon in the top-right to start the export
7. Wait patiently for everything to render

4. Extract .H264 From The MP4's

The "Hello_Video" player is fussy and only works with .h264 raw files. We use Hello_Video for the seamless loops. If you don't care about that you shouldn't have a Loopy Frame, but if you still want one you can use the default player (omx_player) from earlier in the tutorial & skip this step.

So we'll need to use another command line software called ffmpeg to extract the raw .h264 streams from their .mp4 containers. This'll be fun & probably a little annoying.

If you're using Windows, follow this guide to install ffmpeg

Install ffmpeg

1. The most straightforward way to install ffmpeg is with Homebrew. If already have Homebrew installed, skip to step 3.

2. Install Homebrew by pasting this in Terminal /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL [<https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh>](<https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh>))"

   • This should walk you through everything. Follow the instructions
   • When it asks for your password, this is your computer password. Not the Pi.
   • To install Homebrew, you need XCode. If you don't already have Xcode, it should also walk you through installing it
   • Once it's done, you'll see a message like "Installation Successful!"

3. Install ffmpeg with brew install ffmpeg

Extract .h264

1. First you'll need to change your Terminal directory to the folder that has your .mp4 loops. If they're on your desktop, use this cd ~/desktop.
   • cd changes directory. If your files are in a folder in your desktop, you'd use cd ~/desktop/name_of_folder. If your files are somewhere else, you can start typing cd and then drag the containing folder from Finder directly into Terminal. It should add the directory path.
2. Now we'll convert everything to h264

If using mac, paste this code

```bash
for i in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vcodec copy -an -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb "${i%.*}.h264"; done
```

If using Windows, paste this instead

```bash
FOR /F "tokens=*" %G IN ('dir /b *.mp4') DO ffmpeg -i "%G" -vcodec copy -an -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb "%~nG.h264"

```

This should be fast as shit. It's not doing anything other than pulling the .h264 stream out of the .mp4 containers

If it worked, you should have a bunch of brand new .h264 files on your deskop. These are what we need.

It flies thru

<aside> 💡 To convert a directory of h264 loopies back to mp4's, you can use this code (on Mac) for i in *.h264; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -c:v copy -f mp4 "${i%.*}.mp4"; done

</aside>

5. Send Loops to Pi

This is the last real step!!!!!!! We need to connect to your Pi & send files to it. There's a few ways of doing this (sftp, flash drive, or sd card), but we'll be using sftp. To connect via sftp, you'll need Filezilla (or any ftp app).

First Time Setup

1. Open Filezilla
2. To make it easier to reconnect, click the icon at the very top-left, right above "host"
3. Click New Site
4. In the right panel, change Protocol from FTP – File Transfer Protocol to SFTP – SSH File Transfer Protocol
5. Next to Host type your Pi's IP address from earlier
6. For Port type 22
7. Enter your Pi's username / password in their fields
8. Hit Connect. After accepting the security fingerprint, you should be connected 👍

Send in the Loops

1. Connect to your Pi
2. In the right panel, which is your Pi, click into the video folder
3. Drag all of your .h264 files into that folder & wait for them to upload
4. If they don't immediately start playing on your pi, restart the video looper by sending the SSH command from earlier, sudo supervisorctl restart video_looper

If everything worked out, you should have a Loopy that's playing Loops! Forever!