Three kinds of dead time
| Kind | What it looks like in the file | Best tool |
|---|---|---|
| Pause menus and loading screens | A different image that holds for seconds | Manual cuts, or a classifier that knows the game's menu |
| Lag freezes | The previous frame repeated, dozens of times | Duplicate-frame removal (ffmpeg mpdecimate, LagCut) |
| Idle play | Real frames, but nothing interesting happens | Editorial judgment; speed ramps |
They need different tools because they look different to software. A freeze is a repetition, which is easy to detect. A menu is a different picture, which a generic tool cannot tell from gameplay. Idle play is only dead to a human.
1. By hand in an editor
Right for short clips and for idle play. Three habits make it fast: use the editor's frame-step keys to find the exact first and last menu frame; mark cuts on the first pass and ripple-delete them all at once rather than cutting as you go; and for BTD6 specifically, watch the round counter in the corner, since a jump in it after a cut means you removed real gameplay. Budget about two to three minutes of editing per minute of footage.
2. With ffmpeg
Right for freezes in long recordings. One command strips repeated frames and re-times the rest to an even frame rate; the mpdecimate guide has the exact flags and the audio caveat. For menus, ffmpeg can cut by time range once you know the times: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "select='not(between(t,41.2,47.9))',setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB" -an out.mp4 removes seconds 41.2 to 47.9. Finding those times is the manual part.
3. Automatically
Right for games you record a lot. A per-game classifier looks at each frame and labels it gameplay, menu, or repeat, then hands you a cut list. LagCut does this for Bloons TD 6 (it recognises the pause menu and reads the speed button so pacing stays correct) and They Are Billions (it compares only the map viewport, so the clock, tooltips and a webcam don't register as movement). You review the cut list on a timeline, remove any cut you want to keep, add manual ranges, and export a constant-frame-rate MP4 at 1× or 3×. It runs in the browser with nothing uploaded, and processes the first 30 seconds of a clip, so it is for the moment you want to post rather than the full session.
The order of operations that matters
- Remove freezes and menus first.
- Then set the pace. Speeding up footage that still contains repeated frames makes it jerkier, not smoother, because the duplicates are now flashing past at 3×. Why that happens.
- Then add audio. Any cut breaks sync with the original track, so plan on music or re-recorded commentary over cut footage.
Recording so there is less to cut
Use a hardware encoder so the recorder does not compete with the game for CPU, record at a frame rate the game can actually hold, and for CPU-bound late games (BTD6 past round 150, They Are Billions final waves) accept that some freezes are unavoidable and plan to remove them after.
Questions people ask
Is there a tool that removes pause screens from gameplay automatically?
For specific games, yes. LagCut detects the Bloons TD 6 pause menu and lag-frozen frames and cuts both, in the browser. Generic editors cannot recognise a menu; they can only remove repeated frames or cut by time.
Why does my sped-up gameplay look jerky?
Lag freezes are still in the clip as repeated frames. At 3× they flash past and real frames in between get skipped. Remove the duplicates first, then speed up.
Can I keep the game audio after cutting?
Only for cuts you make by hand with the audio attached. Automatic frame removal changes the video length without changing the audio, so exports are video-only and you add sound back in an editor.