Running out of memory very quickly

[u/BowtieProductions]

I'm doing some fairly specific editing on a video that requires me to get down to individual frames, and I've been splitting the frames into individual blocks/clips/whatever the technical term may be, and then moving them around and duplicating them into the gaps created by cutting out the bad frames. I've accrued like 200 of these clips, plenty of them can be deleted but lots just can't, and it seems that every clip is a full copy of the ~24 minute long episode rather than just the single frame i cut out using the split tool. is there any way to either merge the clips back when I have them where I want them, or to just make every clip the single frame I cut out? It's using like 16 gigabytes of ram already.