Why the cuts land on the beat
The edit is locked to the bar grid, not to seconds. What that gives you, and the trap it walks you into.
· 5 minA grid, not a stopwatch
An editing program works in seconds and frames. A piece of music works in bars. The two don't land in the same places, barring coincidence.
So these clips are cut backwards from the usual: shots are placed on the track's bar grid, and their durations are converted to seconds afterwards. A cut therefore always arrives on a beat.
What it looks like
Nobody notices a cut on the beat. That's exactly the intent: it isn't seen, it's heard. What does get noticed is a cut that misses the beat by two or three frames — it produces a floating feeling nobody can quite name.
It's the kind of detail you can't win by arguing. You check it by watching.
The trap
A grid can be perfectly regular and completely offset. If the first beat found is actually the third, the whole grid is regular, consistent, and half a cycle wrong. Every cut lands on a beat — just not the right ones.
No calculation sees the difference, because as far as the calculation is concerned it's the same grid. It's only caught by listening to a metronome laid over the track. That's why that listen is a required step and not an optional check.
And when a shot outruns its loop
A shot can't last longer than the video loop feeding it: otherwise the loop restarts in the middle of the shot, and that does get noticed. So shot lengths are squeezed from both ends — the grid underneath, the loop length above.
When both constraints can't be held at once, something has to give, and that call is made by eye and by ear. Not by a rule.