Loop this video
Alec Jacobson
June 17, 2011
I was taking a look at these shockingly smooth, handmade video-loop textures and started thinking about how to make these automatically. A problem statement could be: take as input a video and an interval that should be repeated, try to produce a loop-able video texture. The goal is to maximize smoothness and proximity to the original interval. Each frame of the output might be composed of different pieces (in time) from the input video, and might barrow from frames outside the input interval, and different parts of the texture might loop at different frequencies. There are quite a few academic papers that present what could be the seeds of this technology, a good place to start is Video Textures. Their page annoyingly doesn't loop their output videos for you, so I made this simple Loop this video! utility.
The examples shown in this and following works are relatively "easy" compared to the handmade video-loop textures, but I think they provide promising first attempts.