How to Make Your First Loops Video
Here's how we're doing it.
Loops is a huge deal for short-form video in the Fediverse. The app is currently in beta, and rapidly gaining new features. However, the lack of built-in recording and editing tools has left some users wondering about how to get started.
This guide is geared towards people interested in making their own flashy videos, with some suggestions on tools and resources that we’re using internally.
Setting Up Your Workflow
Specifications
Loops videos are rendered in 720 x 1280 resolution, but it generally helps to create your videos in 1080 x 1920 before uploading the final video. Regardless of encoding or format, Loops videos are transcoded to HLS MP4 files and slightly compressed to account for storage constraints. Loops videos can be up to one minute long, and can be any file size or resolution prior to upload.
The Loops Layout
When making media for a specific platform, it usually helps to have a template to serve as a guideline. We’ve gone ahead and made a free template in Penpot that creators can use as a guideline.
This is less useful if you plan on just uploading straight video without any text, layers, or filters. If you’re looking to do something with graphics, logos, and animations, though, this can help you play with the layout and figure out how to make everything fit.
Motion Graphics
Right now, the playing field for free and open motion graphics editors are a little uneven. There are desktop-class applications like Natron and Tooll3, but they’re more or less professional tools with a steep learning curve.
For Web-based tools, there’s the open source Motionity and the closed source Pikimov. Either one of these are great for beginners, because you’re just working with layers on a canvas and keyframes. Pikimov has a slight advantage for the fact that it’s actively developed, offers more features, and can work with 3D models.
Editing Clips Together
The final piece of the puzzle is KDEnlive, a free and open desktop editor. We’re using a desktop app because, frankly, there’s just not a lot of open source media editing tools for desktop or mobile.
Our main process here is to take the video exports of our Pikimov clips, and edit them together into segments. Add some music and a nice little outro, and we’re ready to upload our Loop!
Other Tools to Consider
This is just how we’re approaching short-form Fediverse videos. If you’re comfortable with a different tool and process, by all means, go ahead! A few tools we haven’t tried include the following…
OBS Studio
Open Source, Free, Desktop-Based
Believe it or not, OBS Studio can work really well as part of a content production pipeline. Even though most people use it for streaming, the app’s canvas-based approach suits custom content layouts extremely well, and plugins such as Aitum Vertical can work extremely well for producing videos in a vertical resolution.
Open Video Editor
Open Source, Free – Android-Only
I actually had a really hard time finding any kind of open source video editor app for Android, but here’s Open Video Editor. It seems a bit limited, but it’s open source, available through F-Droid, and seems to support basic features such as video layers.
Haiku Animator
Open Source, Web-Based
Haiku Animator is an open source, web-based animation suite. Although it’s primarily used for Lottie animations, which are used in Web and mobile apps, it’s completely feasible that this can be used to export animations as videos
We’re always looking for more recommendations from the community. If there’s an app that’s part of your Loops production workflow, let us know!
