How many cuts should a short-form video have?

The Diagnosis

There's no magic cuts-per-second number, and chasing one produces the worst kind of video: rapid cuts of nothing changing, which feels exactly as slow as one long take of nothing changing. Viewers experience pace as the rate of meaningful change — a new piece of information, a new visual, a new emotional beat. A cut is just one way to deliver change; text arriving, a punch-in, an audio shift, and a scene change all count too. So audit differently: scrub your timeline and ask 'what changes here?' at every few-second interval. Where the honest answer is 'nothing,' that's your problem — fix it with whichever change type fits, not automatically a cut. Then tune the density dial: too little change per second bores viewers out, too much overwhelms them out, and both exits look identical in analytics.