A night of recordings, cut to the part worth watching.
Most of a night is walking. The three seconds either side of each fight are the only part anyone sits through. Cutaway reads every recording from one date, scores it second by second for how much the picture is actually changing, throws out the loading screens, and hard-cuts the best moments together in the order they happened — then stacks it into a vertical frame, sets your words over it, and uploads it.
Why it exists
This came out of a nightly habit. Every evening in Kalimdor gets written into a chapter of a book, and each chapter wanted a short video to go with it. The first version of this tool found the busiest thirty seconds of the night and trimmed them out in one piece. What came back was a beautifully chosen walk through a forest. Nobody watched it.
So it got rebuilt to cut properly — five or six takes of three seconds each, hard-cut, chronological, with a line of text over each one telling you what you are looking at. That is the whole difference between footage and something a person finishes. The tool here is the second version.
Finds the moments
A scene-change score per second across every recording from that date. The peaks are the fights. Frames too dark to read get dropped, so loading screens never make the cut.
Cuts, not trims
Several short takes assembled in the order they happened, each with a tiny audio fade so the joins do not click. One continuous stretch is still there as an option when something needs to play out.
Sets your words
Timed beats across the length — spread evenly, or pinned to exact seconds, with a dot for a deliberate silence. Type is drawn properly, so it works on the many ffmpeg builds that ship without a text filter.
Puts it out
A resumable upload straight to your YouTube channel with the title, description and audience set, and a post to X with the video attached. Your keys stay on your machine.
The whole thing
cutaway build --night 2026-10-05 -o ch11.mp4 \
--story "the long way home | then the vale | six harpies"
cutaway upload ch11.mp4 --title "Chapter XI" --desc "$(cat desc.txt)"
cutaway post --text "new one up" --video ch11.mp4Three commands, and the middle one is optional if you would rather press publish yourself. Put the first two in a shell script behind a nightly timer and the channel runs without you.
Getting started
- Install it.
git clonethe repo, runcutaway setup, answer six questions. It needs ffmpeg and Python, both of which you probably have. - Point it at your recordings. Any folder of mp4s. OBS's replay buffer is ideal — leave it running and hit the hotkey when something happens, or just record the whole session and let the scoring find the moments.
- Connect the accounts you want. X and YouTube are both optional and both take about ten minutes of clicking through a developer console once. Building videos works without either.
Free, MIT licensed, no account, no server, nothing phones home. If it saves you an evening of scrubbing a timeline, that is the entire point.
What it will not do for you
Cutting is the fast part. It is not the part that decides whether anyone watches. Honestly: silent raw gameplay with no commentary reads as filler to people and to YouTube's reused-content policy both, and a tool that makes it faster to produce does not change that. The things that actually moved the channel this came from were the text beats in your own voice, numbering the episodes so each one carries the last, and cutting harder than felt comfortable.
The companion piece is Masque — a painted version of you that sits in the webcam box and talks when you talk. Between the two of them, the footage stops being anonymous.