Loops and continuity

A screen that shows one thing all day — a TV channel in a frame, a lobby backdrop — should never blink. This page is about what keeps running on a screen, and for how long.

When a story has only one shot to play, it plays that shot once and then stays: nothing restarts or fades in again. What is on screen at the end of the shot stays there, the background keeps moving, the clock keeps ticking and a TV channel keeps playing. Things that left earlier — a lower third from 0:02 to 0:07 — do not come back.

What should keep moving on such a screen must loop: a background video, a music bed, a drifting picture. A video that runs out without a loop holds its last picture.

Select a video or a sound and turn on Loop in its inspector — or right-click its bar on the timeline and choose Loop. The part of the file the bar showed becomes the section that repeats; Repeats every changes how long it is, and Use the whole file repeats all of it.

Then drag the bar’s end as far as it should run: the section repeats until the bar ends, and each repeat shows on the bar as a seam with an orange loop mark. Trimming the bar’s start moves the section along the file. A picture with Ken Burns motion can loop too: its drift goes there and back, every eight seconds unless you say.

Loops stay in step on every screen of a video wall. A TV channel is live and never loops.

Right-click a video’s bar and choose Freeze frame. With the playhead inside the video, the picture under the playhead holds for two seconds and the rest of the video carries on after it. With the playhead at the video’s end, Freeze last frame holds its last picture to the end of the shot — and, in a story of one shot, for good. A freeze is an ordinary block: move it, stretch it, or change Holds the frame at.

Give a video the same Match name in two shots that follow each other and tick Keep running on both (Design tab). The two are then the same video: it does not restart, a TV channel does not tune in again, and its box glides from its place in the first shot to its place in the second during the transition.

That is picture in picture: the channel full screen with the news, then small in the corner while a slide explains the program. The first shot decides the file, the trim, the loop and the sound. The video plays behind the shot’s other blocks when it is the shot’s backmost block, and in front of them otherwise.

In a story’s Playback order, select a chapter and set Play this chapter for — say 2 minutes. A chapter that is shorter holds its last moment for the rest of the time (a TV scene of one moment becomes two minutes of TV); a longer one is cut there. So a few headlines, then two minutes of TV is two chapters: the news rolling, then the TV scene played for 2 minutes. Get started → News, then TV makes exactly that. A rolling chapter’s length is set by how many records it plays each round instead.