Peachpit: Animating Rhythm And Dance > Understanding Tempo

Peachpit: Animating Rhythm And Dance > Understanding Tempo: The key to animating dance is to let the tempo of the music drive the animation. Determining the tempo simply requires a watch. Count the number of beats in six seconds of music. Multiply this by 10 to get the beats per minute (BPM). When you have this, you can determine how many frames you'll need per beat of music. For example, a common BPM is 120. At 24 frames per second (fps), the frames per beat would be this:

24 fps x 60 seconds = 1440 frames/minute (fpm)

1440 fpm/120 BPM = 12 frames/beat