A Medal alternative
for the footage already on your drive.

One catches the moment. The other finds it later.

Medal is a capture app with a sharing layer on top. It sits in the background while you play, saves clips on a hotkey, and gets them off your machine and in front of people in about one click. It is free to install, it runs on hardware CutBench flatly refuses, and for a lot of players it is the right and complete answer. If you landed here because someone filed it next to us, the honest reading is that it does a job we do not do at all.

CutBench starts where the recording ends. You point it at a full three-hour session and it works through the whole file: transcribes the speech, listens for gunfire, explosions and voices, watches for scene changes, and reads HUD state such as the wounded screen, the death screen, the inventory, the map and farming. It scores every candidate moment, trims each one to its payoff, crops to 9:16, burns in captions, and leaves finished clips on your drive with a hook and hashtags attached.

Nothing here reads a kill feed or any other text on screen, and nothing is uploaded to work it out. It is picture, sound and speech, scored on your own GPU. What comes back is a list ordered by how strong the moment looks, rather than a folder ordered by timestamp.

So the question is not which tool wins. It is which half of the problem you have right now. If your clips are already picked and you want them shared, Medal has that covered. If your drive holds a dozen sessions and you have no idea which four minutes of the last one are worth anything, that is the half we built.

The axes that actually separate them.

Medal notes checked on 14 August 2026. medal.tv refused our automated request that day, so the pricing line rests on Medal's own support site, which describes Premium as billed monthly or at a discounted yearly rate without printing an amount. We are not going to invent one. Read the current price on the vendor page before you buy.

Run both. They barely overlap.

This is the arrangement we would actually recommend, and trying it costs nothing. Keep clipping live for the moments you know are good while they are happening. Then let the session get read once, properly, for everything you did not catch.

1. Clip the obvious ones live. The ace, the clutch, the thing your friend said. You already know it happened, your finger is already on the key, and the clip exists two seconds later. Nothing beats that loop and we are not trying to.
2. Record the session as well. Whatever you already use is fine, including a full session recording from Medal itself. CutBench reads ordinary MP4 and MKV files off the disk. There is nothing to install into the game, no overlay and no hook.
3. Run the session through CutBench afterwards. Start it when you stop playing and go do something else. It comes back with a ranked list of what it found, trimmed and captioned, including the moments you never pressed the key for.
4. Post from whichever one is closer. Share the live clips the way you already do. Publish the vertical cuts to TikTok or YouTube from inside CutBench, on a calendar if you want them spread out instead of dumped at once.

What a live clipper cannot fix.

Nobody searches for an alternative to a free tool they are happy with. They search when something specific has started to annoy them, and with in-game clippers it is usually one of these three.

• It only catches what you remembered to trigger. The best moment of the night is often the one you were too busy surviving to clip. A hotkey cannot save a moment your hands were not free for, and it cannot save the slow build-up that made the moment land.
• It is working while your game needs the hardware. A rolling buffer captures and encodes every second you play. On a modern NVIDIA card the encode itself runs on a dedicated block, so the hit is usually small, but it is not zero, and it tends to show up in your 1% lows before it moves your average. CutBench takes the opposite trade by construction: it is not running during the game, so its cost to in-game frame rate is zero.
• You end up with hundreds of unsorted short clips. Every clip you saved looked worth saving at the time. Two weeks later it is a folder of near-identical thumbnails and nothing tells you which six are actually good. Ranking is the part nobody wants to do by hand, and it is the part that gets handed off here.

If none of those three is bothering you, you do not need us yet, and that is a perfectly good place to be.

Free to install versus one line item.

Medal is free to install and it stays useful without paying, with an optional paid tier on top. We checked on 14 August 2026 and could not load medal.tv with our automated fetch, so instead of quoting a number we cannot stand behind, here is what Medal's own support site says: Premium is billed monthly or at a discounted yearly rate. Go and read the current price on their site before you decide anything.

CutBench is $34.99 once, on Steam. No per-clip credits, no tiers, no renewal. The free demo runs the identical pipeline on your own footage and marks the exports with a watermark, so you can measure the ranking on your own games, on your own hardware, before spending anything.

Worth saying plainly: if free is the requirement, keep Medal and keep your money. We are not the cheaper option here and we will not pretend to be. What the $34.99 buys is the part that reads three hours so you do not have to.

When Medal is the better pick.

What going local costs you.

Doing the work after the game, on your own machine, buys privacy, a one-time price and zero in-game overhead. It charges you in hardware and patience. Worth knowing before you buy:

• Windows and NVIDIA only. Windows 10 or 11, 8 GB of RAM, 30 GB of free disk, and an NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB of VRAM and CUDA 11.8 or newer, meaning an RTX 2060, RTX 3050 8GB or RTX 4050 and up. 16 GB of RAM and a card with 10 GB of VRAM or more is the comfortable configuration.
• No AMD, no Intel Arc, no Mac, no Linux. There is no fallback path and no browser version. If that is your setup, stay with a capture app, and we would rather say so here than after you have paid.
• It is not instant. A 3-hour session runs roughly 2 to 5 hours on an RTX 3060 class card. You start it and leave. What you get back is a whole session's worth of clips, not one.
• You need the session on disk. A single buffer clip is not much to work with. This pays off when you record the whole thing and let it be read afterwards.
• The models ship inside the build. After that it works with no connection at all. A connection is only needed to publish.
• Your PC is busy while it works. Best run overnight or while you are away, not mid-raid.

What you get for the footage you kept.

• The whole session, not one clip. Watching three hours back to find the six seconds that matter is the part that gets handed off.
• The moments you never triggered. Scoring runs over the entire file, so it does not care whether your hands were free at the time.
• A ranked list instead of a folder. Every candidate is scored and ordered, so the weak ones sit at the bottom instead of eating your attention.
• Zero cost to in-game frame rate. Nothing is running while you play, because the work happens after you quit.
• Local and private. Your raw recording, party voice and all, stays on your drive. Nothing is uploaded to be analysed and there is no account to create first.
• One-time license. Buy once on Steam and clip as long as the PC runs. No monthly bill, no credits to ration at the end of the month.
• Game-aware ranking. Scoring reads HUD state and game audio. It is tuned on Rust raids and ARC Raiders extractions, with a strong generic profile on everything else.

Medal-and-CutBench FAQ.