# Filming b-roll on a phone that cuts well

> A beat-matched edit eats clips faster than anyone expects. The settings, the six shots worth getting every time, and why four seconds is the right length.

Canonical: https://easyreels.io/blog/filming-b-roll-on-a-phone

[Blog](https://easyreels.io/blog) · How-to

13 September 20265 min read

Shoot in 4K at 30fps if you have the storage, lock exposure and focus before each take, hold every shot for four to six seconds, and shoot vertically. Get forty clips in a session rather than four, because a thirty-second reel cutting on every second beat needs about thirty distinct shots and you will not have them.

The bottleneck in beat-matched editing is almost never the edit. It is that a thirty-second video at 120 BPM cutting on every second beat needs around thirty shots, and most people arrive with nine.

## How much footage a reel actually eats

| Video length | Cut density | Shots needed |
|---|---|---|
| 15s at 120 BPM | Every 2nd beat | ~15 |
| 30s at 120 BPM | Every 2nd beat | ~30 |
| 30s at 120 BPM | Every beat | ~60 |
| 30s at 140 BPM | Every 2nd beat | ~35 |

You can reuse shots (most edits do), and a repeated angle at a different point in the track is not noticeable. But an edit built from nine clips repeated four times each looks like an edit built from nine clips. Forty is the number that makes a folder feel deep, and forty is a two-hour session, not a week.

Shoot for the folder, not for the video. The clip you take today gets used in four different reels over six months against three different tracks, which is the argument in [turning old footage into new reels](https://easyreels.io/blog/repurpose-footage-you-already-have).

## Settings, once

- **Vertical.** Always. Horizontal footage cropped to 9:16 loses two thirds of the frame and every composition you thought you had.
- **4K at 30fps** if storage allows, 1080p at 30fps otherwise. 4K gives you room to reframe and punch in during the edit; it is the one real reason to shoot above delivery resolution.
- **30fps, not 60**, unless you specifically want slow motion. 60fps halves the bits per frame and buys smoothness nobody notices in a video that cuts every second.
- **Lock exposure and focus** before each take: tap and hold on most phones. Autofocus hunting mid-shot is the single most common thing that makes a clip unusable.
- **Grid on.** Free, and it fixes horizons.
- **Clean the lens.** Genuinely. A smeared lens is the most common cause of soft footage and takes two seconds to rule out.

One setting to avoid: heavy in-camera filters or beauty modes. You want a neutral clip that takes a grade later, because the grade is applied across the whole video at once: [colour grading short video](https://easyreels.io/blog/color-grading-short-video) explains why one look beats per-clip fiddling.

## Four to six seconds a shot

Long enough to trim from both ends, short enough that a session produces volume. Roll for a beat before the action starts and a beat after it finishes: the first and last half-second of a handheld clip almost always contain a wobble as you start and stop.

Longer takes are not wasted, they are just harder to file. If you shoot a two-minute continuous take, split it into clips before it goes into a folder, or it sits there as one entry nobody reaches for.

## The six shots to get every time

A usable session is not forty versions of one angle. It is six categories, each shot several ways, which is what lets an edit have variety without you thinking about variety during the edit.

| Shot | What it is | Where it lands in the edit |
|---|---|---|
| The wide | The whole scene, once | The establishing beat, sparingly |
| The medium | The subject, waist-up or equivalent | The workhorse |
| The close | Detail: hands, texture, a label | Where the video feels expensive |
| The move | A slow push in, or a pan across | Breaks up a run of static shots |
| The transition | Something entering or leaving frame | Hides a cut between locations |
| The cutaway | A hand closing a box, a light switching on | The shot every edit needs and nobody shoots |

The last row is the one to internalise. Cutaways are boring to film and they are what makes an edit flow; the reason so many reels feel choppy is that every clip is a hero shot and there is nothing between them.

## Movement, and how much

- **Slower than feels right.** Phone footage exaggerates movement, and a pan that felt gentle looks frantic at 9:16.
- **Move your body, not your wrists.** Step in, step across. Wrist movement is where the shake lives.
- **One movement per shot.** A pan that becomes a tilt that becomes a push is three shots fighting in one clip and none of them cuts cleanly.
- **Static shots are fine.** In a video that cuts every second, the cut is the movement. A whole edit of moving shots is exhausting to watch.

## Light, in one paragraph

Shoot near a window with the light coming from the side, not behind the subject. Avoid overhead midday sun and avoid mixing daylight with warm indoor bulbs in one shot, because a grade applied to the whole video cannot fix two different colour temperatures at once. Dark footage is also the first thing platform compression destroys: [why Instagram ruins your video quality](https://easyreels.io/blog/reel-video-quality), so err brighter than you think.

## A two-hour session that fills a month

1. **Pick one location and one subject.** Variety comes from angles, not from driving somewhere else.
2. **Work through the six shot types** deliberately, several takes of each. Ten minutes per category is forty minutes.
3. **Shoot the boring cutaways** while you are still there. You will not come back for them.
4. **Get twenty seconds of nothing**: a wall, a texture, the sky. These become the breathing room between busy shots.
5. **Review on the phone before you leave.** Anything soft, shaky or badly exposed gets reshot now rather than discovered on Monday.
6. **File into folders as you import**: by subject, not by shoot date. A folder called "hands" gets used; a folder called "September 13" does not.

Folders are the part that makes the footage usable rather than merely present. In [Easy Reels](https://easyreels.io/) a template pulls from folders you choose, so a well-sorted library means a new video is a generation rather than an afternoon of scrubbing, the mechanic behind [batch-creating reels](https://easyreels.io/blog/batch-create-reels).

## What to skip

- **A gimbal, at first.** Useful eventually, unnecessary while you still have nine clips instead of forty. Volume beats stabilisation.
- **Cinematic mode and fake depth of field.** It fails at the edges of moving subjects and the failure is obvious at phone size.
- **Log or flat profiles**, unless you are genuinely going to grade each clip. A neutral standard profile takes a filter better than a flat one nobody corrected.
- **Shooting to a script.** B-roll is raw material; deciding what each clip is for while filming is what produces nine clips.

The whole discipline reduces to one habit: shoot more than you need, of duller things than you expect, and sort it before you forget what it was. A deep folder makes every subsequent edit cheap, and cheap edits are the only kind that get made every week.

**About this article.** Written by the team that builds Easy Reels, which cuts your clips to the beat of a song and renders a finished vertical reel. Spotted something wrong or out of date? Write to [support@easyreels.io](mailto:support@easyreels.io).

## Stop editing. Start posting.

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## Read next

- [Turn old footage into new reels, not reposts](https://easyreels.io/blog/repurpose-footage-you-already-have)Most accounts are sitting on months of unused clips. How to audit what you have, and what makes a re-cut read as new rather than as a repost.
- [How to batch-create reels from one folder of footage](https://easyreels.io/blog/batch-create-reels)Posting daily needs a system, not more hours. How to build a month of beat-matched videos from footage you already have, in one sitting.
- [How to make reels without showing your face](https://easyreels.io/blog/faceless-reels)Seven footage types that carry a faceless account, why the edit has to work harder when there is no face, and the system that makes it repeatable.