There is a real answer to this, and it is arithmetic before it is taste.
The arithmetic
Beats per minute divided by 60 gives beats per second. Multiply by the length of the video and you have the number of beats available to cut on.
| Track | Beats in 30s | Every beat | Every 2nd beat |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90 BPM (downtempo) | 45 | 45 cuts | 22 cuts |
| 120 BPM (house, pop) | 60 | 60 cuts | 30 cuts |
| 140 BPM (trap, drum & bass) | 70 | 70 cuts | 35 cuts |
| 174 BPM (jungle) | 87 | 87 cuts | 43 cuts |
What the footage wants
- Motion-heavy footage — skating, driving, dancing — survives fast cutting, because each shot reads instantly.
- Detail footage — product shots, food, text on screen — needs a beat or two to land. Every second beat, minimum.
- Faces and talking — cut sparingly. A face cut every 0.5s reads as nervous, not energetic.
- Mixed footage — pace it to the slowest thing in the edit, or the detail shots get lost.
The minimum-gap guard
Detected beats are not perfectly even — a live drummer pushes and drags, and a detector faithfully reports it. Two beats 0.15 seconds apart produce a shot nobody sees.
A minimum gap solves it: any beat closer than the threshold to the previous cut is skipped. Around 0.4 seconds keeps the rhythm legible without flattening it. This is a setting worth having rather than a problem worth ignoring, because the alternative is finding the flash frame after you have posted.
A starting recipe
- Cut on every second beat.
- Set the minimum gap to 0.4 seconds.
- Watch it once. If it feels sleepy, move to every beat rather than changing the song.
- If a specific moment wants a longer hold, delete that one cut rather than changing the density.
Easy Reels exposes both controls directly — density and the gap guard — so the answer is a setting rather than sixty manual trims. See beat detection explained for why the gap guard is necessary at all.