About Stream-Cut
Reaction streamers spend hours live, then spend hours more scrubbing the recording to find the bits worth posting. Stream-Cut removes the second part. You mark the good moments as they happen, live, and your stream comes back already cut into clips. No algorithm guessing where something interesting was — you were there, and you told it.
The idea in one line
You react live; every reaction is recorded as a boundary; after the stream, your recording is cut at exactly those boundaries into individual clips, ready to post. That is the whole product. Everything below is how each part serves it.
On your machine: Stream-Cut Studio
Stream-Cut Studio is a small desktop app for Windows and macOS. It plays a queue of video files from your own computer — you supply the clips you want to react to; we never download them from anywhere.
- The queue plays, you react. Play, pause, next, previous. When a clip ends, your camera expands to take the screen on its own, so there is no dead air and no clicking between reactions.
- Every boundary is marked live. Pressing Next ends one reaction and starts the next. One hotkey marks the five minutes around a moment that just happened; another marks ten — for when the good bit arrives with no warning.
- OBS, optionally. Connect OBS and Stream-Cut can start your recording and read its exact position, which makes clip timing precise to the frame. Without OBS, a quiet audio marker does the same job slightly less exactly. Either way, OBS does the streaming and recording — Stream-Cut is just a window in your scene.
- Nothing is lost if the connection drops. Reaction boundaries are written to your disk before they are sent, and upload when you are back. If the app closes, they are still there next launch.
The marking system
This is the heart of the product. Three controls, all on hotkeys you can hit without looking away from the stream:
- Next ends the current reaction and starts the next clip in the queue. The span between one Next and the next is a reaction — that is the boundary that becomes a clip. Previous steps back.
- Mark 5 captures the five minutes around a moment that just happened — two and a half already recorded, two and a half still to come. It is for when the good bit lands with no warning: a full-screen reaction, a long video with no clip boundaries, a conversation that suddenly turns. You do not have to see it coming.
- Mark 10 does the same across ten minutes, for a longer run.
Because you mark live, the boundaries are intention, not inference. You are not leaving an algorithm a note to "look here later" — you are recording, in the moment, that this is the bit worth posting. Two consequences fall out of that:
- Replays fold into one clip. React to the same video three times in a row and you get one clip covering the whole bit, not three fragments. Come back to it much later in the stream and that is a separate reaction, as you would expect.
- Stream length costs nothing. Other tools scan the whole recording to guess where something happened and bill you per minute processed. Stream-Cut already knows where the moments are, so a three-hour stream is no more work to clip than a thirty-minute one.
Where the cutting happens
When you stop streaming, OBS saves a video file on your own computer, and Stream-Cut Studio already knows where. The obvious thing to do next is send us that file. It is also the wrong thing: these recordings are often 10–15 GB, which on a normal home connection is hours of uploading before you see a single clip — and the overwhelmingly common outcome of a three-hour wait is a streamer who stops bothering.
So by default Stream-Cut Studio does the cutting itself, on the machine the file is already sitting on, and sends only the clips. A four-hour stream becomes a few hundred megabytes instead of fifteen gigabytes. Minutes, not hours. Your recording never leaves your PC.
It also changes when you get to look at them. The list appears the moment the session ends, while you still remember what happened: every moment it found, what your crowd made of each one, which ones you marked and which it is only suggesting. You tick what you want, nudge an edge a second either way if a boundary is off, choose portrait or captions or your logo, and press the button. Nothing is sent until you do.
If a clip comes out wrong, nothing is lost — the recording is still on your disk. Ask for it again from the dashboard and Studio re-cuts it the next time you open it on that machine.
You can also ask us to hold the whole stream. It is slower, but then there is an off-site copy, which is worth having the day a drive dies: that upload is resumable and its progress is kept on our side, so a dropped connection or a closed laptop carries on from where it stopped rather than starting a twelve-gigabyte file again. If the file at that path has changed in the meantime it starts fresh rather than stitching two recordings together. And you can send nothing at all, which is the right setting if you edit your recordings before anything else sees them.
How auto-clipping works
Either way, there are two things in play: the video, and the list of reaction boundaries you marked live. Turning one into clips is three steps, and these are automatic. They run in the same code whether the cut happens on your PC or ours, so a clip does not move depending on where it was made:
- Alignment. Your marks are in stream time; the recording has its own clock. If OBS was connected, Stream-Cut knows the recorder's exact position at the start marker, so the two line up to the frame. Without OBS, it finds a quiet sync tone it placed at the start and aligns to that.
- Drift correction. Recorder clocks run slightly fast or slow, and across three hours that error grows — enough to push a late clip seconds out of place. Stream-Cut measures the gap between a start and end marker and corrects for the drift across the whole session, so the last clip is as accurate as the first.
- The cut. Each boundary is trimmed out of the recording into its own clip. Cut on your own machine it is always re-encoded, and deliberately: a straight copy can only cut on a keyframe, which with OBS's usual settings means nudging a boundary by a second would not move the cut at all. Cut on our side it is copied without re-encoding where it can be, and re-encodes when it has to — a logo, captions or a portrait crop.
If alignment comes back uncertain, Stream-Cut does not guess silently: it tells you, and you confirm by entering the timecode of the visible marker near the start of your recording, which snaps every boundary into place at once.
During the stream: getting the reactions
The clips are only as good as the reactions, so Stream-Cut helps you get them:
- Live viewer reactions. Share a room code; your viewers open it on their phones and tap reactions as you stream. A meter shows the spikes in real time — you can feel the room.
- A soundboard for your own effects on global hotkeys, full-screen stage backgrounds behind the clips, and a lip-syncing avatar that can stand in for your camera.
- Audio you control. Pick your microphone and speakers, with noise suppression on the mic so keyboard and room noise stay out of the clips.
- Milestone alerts and pacing nudges as the session runs, so the energy does not sag.
- A promotion slot. A line of text or a short video in rotation — your tip link, your Discord, something you are selling. If you add a link, your viewers get a button for it on the phone they are already holding, which is the only place a link on a live stream is actually clickable.
- A warning when something is wrong. OBS connected but not recording, a drive minutes from full, frames being dropped, a microphone that has gone silent. Silent when everything is fine.
After the stream: the dashboard
Once the cut above has run, the dashboard is where the stream becomes finished output:
- Every reaction is its own clip, trimmed to where you started and stopped reacting, listed with its length and source.
- The crowd ranks them. Clips are ordered by how hard your viewers reacted. Moments the crowd reacted to that you did not mark come back as suggestions you approve — never clipped behind your back, because a human still decides what ships.
- Fix anything. Drag a boundary and re-render; your edit is kept even if the sync is recalculated later.
Output: set before you render
Before you generate a stream's clips, you choose how they come out — and it is per stream, so tonight can go vertical for TikTok and tomorrow stay landscape, without changing a global setting:
- Vertical 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, or landscape.
- Burn-in captions, transcribed automatically — the way clips are watched on mute.
- Your own logo on every clip.
Then download clips one at a time or take the lot. Every one of these is on every plan, including the trial.
Playing, not just reacting
Reacting to clips is one kind of stream; playing something is the other. The same marking, cutting and crowd machinery works either way, and the games side exists so that going from “I want to stream this game” to streaming it is one click rather than forty minutes of OBS.
- Your library, found for you. Steam, Epic and GOG are read off your own disk — including the artwork already sitting there — so nothing has to be typed in and nothing is fetched from a storefront on your behalf.
- One button does four things. It launches the game, switches your OBS scene to the one you picked for it, starts the recording and starts the Stream-Cut session. When you quit, it closes the session and switches back.
- Launched the way the shop intends. Through the store's own handler, so nothing is injected, hooked or tunnelled and anti-cheat has nothing to object to. We do not host game files and never will — games come from the shops that sell them.
- Clips that know what you were playing, which turns your crowd's reactions into an honest per-game comparison: your ranked clips against your casual ones, from your own data, with no model guessing at anything.
- A free-to-play and open-source shelf, linked to the projects' and publishers' own download pages, so a brand-new user with an empty library can be streaming in five minutes.
Going live on more than one platform
OBS sends one stream to Stream-Cut and Stream-Cut copies it to every platform you list. The video is not re-encoded, so every destination gets byte-identical quality — which is also what keeps you inside Twitch's rule that its stream must be no worse than the others. TikTok is the exception, because its canvas is portrait and a portrait feed has to be re-encoded; that one costs CPU and is marked as doing so.
The honest cost is your upload: two platforms means sending your stream twice, and if your connection cannot carry it then every platform stutters at once. So the figure is shown before you commit, measured against the bitrate OBS is actually configured for rather than one we assumed.
Stream keys are secrets and are treated as such — entered as passwords, never printed in a log, and never written into an error message. A TikTok key dies when its broadcast ends, so a saved one is never reused.
Stream-Cut also watches the handful of things that quietly ruin a stream and says so while you can still fix them: OBS connected but not recording, a drive minutes from full, dropped frames, a microphone that stopped producing sound.
Other streamers
A board, not an inbox. You post what you want to play — the game, the mode, your region — and it expires after four hours. Anyone can see the same post, and they reach you through the links you chose to publish. There are no private messages in Stream-Cut and there will not be: a private channel between strangers is the one thing a small team cannot moderate, and we would rather not have it than have it badly.
Your profile is private until you publish it — filling it in is not publishing it — and carries no real name, no age, and nothing finer than a continent you pick yourself. Unpublish and the page is gone the same second. You can block anybody without explaining it to us, and report anybody without them being hidden automatically on one report.
There are weekly challenges, counted from your own clips and sessions rather than anything you submit, and a promotion slot — a line of text or a short video in rotation for your tip link, your Discord or something you sell, with a button on the phones your viewers are already tapping reactions on. If you are paid for a promotion, it carries a disclosure label.
Posting to platforms
When clips are ready, a Publish with Postly button in your dashboard hands off to Postly — a dedicated multi-platform scheduler — so you can queue and post to TikTok, Reels, Shorts and the rest from one place. We hand this off deliberately rather than building a dozen brittle, approval-gated publishing integrations ourselves; it keeps Stream-Cut focused on what it does best, turning your stream into clips, and lets a tool built for scheduling own the scheduling.
Your content, and copyright
Stream-Cut plays video from your own machine and does not download anything from TikTok, Instagram or YouTube on your behalf. You are responsible for having the right to use what you react to — reacting to your own content, or content you are licensed to use, is the safe path and doubles as native promotion. We keep a copyright and takedown policy, and we delete recordings and clips on a schedule you are told up front rather than holding your footage indefinitely.
What it costs
Free for 14 days, no card. After that, plans differ by how much you stream, store and cut — not by features. Captions, vertical export, your logo, viewer reactions, crowd-ranked clips, multistreaming, the games section, the soundboard and the avatar are on every plan, including the cheapest. Nothing is locked behind a tier.
Starter is $15 a month and makes ten clips from each stream, which you choose from the list at the end of a session. Creator is $29 and makes every clip from every stream. Pro is $79 and adds storage, longer retention and priority in the queue.
Those prices are in US dollars and are before tax. Billing is handled by Paddle as the merchant of record: Paddle is the legal seller, and it registers, collects and remits sales tax and VAT wherever you are, so tax is added at checkout and you see the exact total before paying. The EU and UK work the other way round, because an advertised price there has to include VAT by law — so you are shown a local price with the VAT already inside it rather than a dollar price that grows at the till.