Short version

Menus are easy to spot and tedious to cut: each one is two edit points. In an editor, use markers and ripple delete. For BTD6 footage, a frame classifier can recognise the pause menu's layout and cut every visit in one pass alongside the repeated frames from lag.

Why pause menus are worth cutting

A pause-menu visit is dead time: the viewer is looking at a static overlay while nothing happens. In a long late-game session there might be dozens of them (checking a tower, adjusting targeting, answering a message). Each one costs you a chunk of audience retention, and each one is two cuts in the timeline.

Doing it by hand in an editor

  1. Scrub at high speed and drop a marker on each menu. Menus are visually obvious even at 8× scrub speed, so a first pass is quick. Premiere: M. DaVinci: M. CapCut: the flag icon.
  2. Jump marker to marker and set in/out points. The in point is the frame the menu appears; the out point is the first frame of gameplay after it closes.
  3. Ripple delete. Use ripple (not lift) so the gap closes and the rest of the timeline shifts left. Premiere: Shift+Delete. DaVinci: Shift+Backspace in ripple mode.
  4. Watch the joins. If the game state looks the same before and after, the cut is invisible. If a lot changed while the menu was open, consider a short crossfade or a cut-to-black so the jump reads as intentional.

Budget roughly 30-60 seconds per menu once you're in a rhythm. For a dozen visits that's fine. For a two-hour session with a hundred, it isn't.

Detecting them automatically

A pause menu has a fixed layout: the same panel, the same buttons, in the same place, every time. That makes it recognisable to a simple frame classifier, which can flag every frame that matches the menu's layout and mark the run of frames between the menu opening and closing as a cut.

LagCut does this for BTD6. It scans each frame, classifies it as gameplay, pause menu, or a repeat of the previous frame, and builds a cut list. You review the list, remove anything you want to keep, then export. On a boss-tournament recording with three menu visits in a 30-second window, it cut all three along with 1,340 repeated frames.

The advantage over manual cutting isn't just speed. Because the same pass also removes the frozen frames from lag (see why recordings have duplicate frames), the finished clip comes out at one consistent pace with menus and stalls both gone, and you add audio once at the end.

Tips for cleaner cuts

  • Don't fully trust any automatic cut list. Review it. A frame that resembles a menu (a big popup, a shop screen) can be flagged; one click removes a false cut.
  • Keep the original. Export to a new file so you can redo the cut with different settings.
  • Add audio last. Menus and stalls change the timing, so commentary recorded live won't line up anyway. Record or re-sync voice-over to the cleaned clip.