Getting started

From a game you played to a finished video, in four steps.

1. A game, as a PGN

Every chess game can be written down as plain text. That format is called PGN, for Portable Game Notation, and it is what every chess site and program reads. A short one looks like this:

[Event "Casual game"] 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 *

A PGN can also carry comments, and that is where ChessDrama Studio keeps your work. Your effects, your board colours and your timings all live inside the game's own comments, so a project is still an ordinary PGN that any other program can open, and nothing you make is locked inside this app.

2. Bring a game in

The quick way: import from Chess.com or Lichess

In the studio, open the File menu and choose Import online game. Pick the site, type any player's username, and their recent games are listed newest first with the result, the opponent and the time control. Fetch more goes further back. Press Import on the one you want.

Your browser asks those sites directly, so it works for anyone's public games, not only your own. Nothing is sent to us.

The manual way: paste a PGN

• Chess.com: open the game, then Share → PGN, and copy the text or download the file.
• Lichess: open the game and use the FEN & PGN panel below the board, or add .pgn to the game's web address.
• Anywhere else: any .pgn file will do.

Then use File → Import PGN and paste it in, or choose the file. You can also just play the moves out on the board if the game is short or you are inventing a line.

Auto Recap

Both import dialogs carry an Auto Recap tick box. With it on, an imported game arrives already built: titled from the event and round, every move badged by the engine, the engine's move drawn as an arrow on each error, a faint red tint and a held beat on each mistake, and the result on screen at the end with the loser's king toppled. It is the fastest way to see what the studio can do, and a good starting point to edit down.

3. Add effects

Effects belong to a ply. Select one in the move list, then use the + beside it, or the + at the left of the bar under the board. Pick an effect and it opens in the editor panel, with the board live beside it so you can see every change as you make it.

What is a ply? A ply is one player's move. White plays e4 and that is a ply; Black answers e5 and that is another, so what a chess book calls "move 1" is two of them. The studio counts in plies because the video shows one at a time, and an effect measured in plies keeps its place when you change the pace later.

• Arrows and emphasis point at squares. You can also draw them straight onto the board by right-dragging between two squares, or right-clicking one.
• Flags, titles and subtitles put words on screen.
• Animations, zooms and filters are the drama: explosions, camera moves and colour treatments.
• Review badges mark a move as brilliant, a blunder, book theory and so on. Game Review fills them in for the whole game with the engine.
• Voice over attaches a recorded clip to a ply. See the export section below.

The Effect Actions box under the effects list does several plies at once. Game Review badges every move; Draw Best Move Arrows shows the engine's choice on each mistake; Apply Effect to Errors puts an animation, zoom or emphasis on every blunder; and Label Tactics finds the forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks, attractions and sacrifices that actually win something and marks each with a flag and arrows through the pieces involved.

Most of what an effect looks like starts from the Global Settings tab: colours, fonts, sizes, arrow thickness, badge style, the board itself. Change something there and every effect that was left alone follows, which is the quickest way to restyle a whole video at the end. Set the same thing on a single effect and only that one changes.

Each ply holds for a moment before the next, and each effect has its own length. Most span plies rather than seconds, so they stay in step with the moves when you change the pace later. A move can also hold several frames, which are separate scenes on the same position, for when you want to say two things about one move.

The effects library shows every one of them with a preview.

4. Get a video out

Record it yourself

Press Record in the left rail. The line plays at video pace, full screen and free of the editor's furniture, so you can capture it with whatever screen recorder you already use.

This is the one to choose if you narrate as you go. Talking over the moves while you record gives you the timing, the pauses and the reactions that make a walkthrough worth watching, and no pre-recorded audio can match that. It is free, and it works on any account.

Render it in the cloud

Press Render in the left rail to have our servers draw every frame and hand you a finished MP4. Choose the resolution up to 4K, the frame rate, and the shape: landscape, square, portrait or vertical for short-form. The job runs while you get on with something else, and we email you when the file is ready. Finished files stay available for seven days.

Cloud rendering takes pre-recorded voice-over clips, one per ply. Record or upload a clip on a move and the render mixes it into the audio at exactly the right moment, holding that ply long enough for the clip to finish. That is how you get narrated video without recording the whole thing in one take, and it is the reason to prefer this route if you would rather edit than perform.

Cloud rendering and voice-over uploads are part of the Pro subscription . Recording it yourself is free.

Advanced users

Frames: more than one scene on a move

A frame is a group of effects sitting on one position. Give a move two frames and it plays as two scenes: the pieces do not move between them, but everything drawn on top of them changes. Use it when a single move has two things to say — draw the threat, then answer it.

In playback a frame behaves as a ply of its own. It takes its own turn in the line, the arrows under the board step from frame to frame rather than move to move, and an effect measured in plies counts a frame as one.

Each frame also carries its own duration. Set it and that scene holds for exactly that long; leave it and it takes the usual length — the voice-over's length if it has one, the read-aloud text's if it has that, otherwise your seconds-per-move. A move's total time on screen is simply its frames added up.

Add one with Add frame at the foot of the + menu. The move list nests a move's frames underneath it, and in the timeline each frame is a bar of its own that you can drag wider or narrower to change how long it holds.

Where things are kept

Save keeps a project on your account, and My projects lists them. Export PGN writes the whole thing, effects and all, to a file you can keep or share. Unsaved work is held in your browser between visits, but a saved project is the one that is safe.

Install it as an app

ChessDrama Studio can be installed like any app, so it opens in its own window from your dock, home screen or app list. In Chrome and Edge on a computer or Android phone, open the account menu (the circle at the top right) and choose Install app, or use the install icon the browser shows in its address bar. On an iPhone or iPad, open the share sheet in Safari and choose Add to Home Screen; on a Mac, Safari's File → Add to Dock does the same. Installing changes nothing about your account or projects.

Watch it done

A quick demo of the Studio.