ChessCut Studio is an interactive timeline editor built for chess content creators, coaches, and players. Upload your PGN games and enrich every half-move with staircase vision rays, move classification badges, Epic Edit trails, and dynamic piece choreography—directly in your browser.
Traditional chess analysis boards are built for static study, not video storytelling. ChessCut Studio transforms every half-move in your PGN file into an editable keyframe packed with visual effects.
Select any piece on the board to illuminate its attack lines with a smooth step-by-step staircase animation. Choose between Standard Attack, X-Ray Pierce, or interactive Custom Paint mode with full hex color control.
Run our built-in move classifier to automatically tag Book moves, Brilliant sacrifices (!!), Great moves (!), Best, Inaccuracies (?!), Mistakes (?), and Blunders (??), or manually assign any badge to any piece.
Activate Epic Edit Mode for slow-motion piece choreography, badge-colored movement trails, capture particle splatters, full-board crimson blunder filters, and dramatic 360° aerial Punch Drops that shake the board on impact.
Illustrate positional concepts visually. Mark passive, undeveloped rooks or bishops with a floating "Zz" sleeping rocking animation, or highlight threatened kings with a nervous trembling effect and sweat drop indicator.
Includes a real-time vertical Evaluation Bar synchronized with cloud Stockfish analysis and local quiescence search, paired with synthesized Web Audio sound effects for moves, captures, checks, checkmates, and vision rays.
Match your channel's branding with 4 crisp vector piece styles—including Lichess Classic, Classic Neo, Minimalist, and Royal 3D—alongside 6 curated board color palettes and adjustable auto-playback speeds.
Go from a raw PGN text file to a polished, animated chess sequence in under two minutes without complex video keyframing software.
Import any standard `.pgn` file exported from Lichess, Chess.com, or tournament databases, or paste the raw algebraic move notation directly into the loader.
Navigate half-move by half-move using the horizontal keyframe timeline or keyboard arrows. Enable the one-click Move Classifier to automatically tag tactical highlights.
Tap any piece on any move to open the mobile-style bottom dock. Add colored vision rays, Brilliant/Blunder badges, Sleeping/Scared animations, or Punch Drop effects.
Set your desired playback speed, press Auto-Play, and capture the clean board canvas with your screen recorder for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Reels, or full-length lessons.
Paul Morphy's famous 1858 Opera Game comes pre-loaded in the studio so you can try every effect immediately.
Whether you produce short-form tactical recaps or teach structured opening courses, ChessCut Studio streamlines your visual production.
Stand out on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels. Viewer retention depends on clear visual pacing—our Epic Edit trails, 360° Knight spins, and Blunder filters keep audiences hooked through every tactical combination.
Help students visualize board geometry effortlessly. Use Staircase Vision rays and Custom Paint mode to demonstrate long-diagonal bishop pins, rook X-ray attacks, and outposts, or mark passive pieces with the Sleeping animation.
Share your best immortal games and brilliant sacrifices with friends and club members. Load your PGN, run the automatic move classifier to highlight your best moves, and review the game with live evaluation feedback.
ChessCut Studio was created by a team of passionate chess players, web developers, and digital video enthusiasts who noticed a major gap in the chess content ecosystem. While watching viral chess recaps and educational breakdowns online, we saw creators spending hours in complex desktop video editors manually masking squares, keyframing piece spins, and drawing frame-by-frame attack rays.
We built ChessCut Studio to automate that entire creative workflow directly inside the web browser. By combining a legal chess rules engine with a mobile-inspired keyframe timeline, our platform understands the geometry of the chessboard natively. It knows how bishops slice across diagonals, how knights jump in L-shapes, and when a sacrifice truly deserves a Brilliant badge.
Our commitment is to provide a fast, privacy-friendly, and accessible web studio that works seamlessly across desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones—empowering creators of all skill levels to share the beauty and drama of chess with the world.
Your PGN files and custom edits are processed locally inside your browser session.
Designed with intuitive bottom-dock drawers inspired by modern mobile photo and video apps.
No plugins, heavy downloads, or paid subscriptions required to start editing.
Common questions about PGN compatibility, move classification, and visual effect editing.
PGN stands for Portable Game Notation, the universal text format used to record chess games. You can export a PGN file or copy the PGN text after any game played on platforms like Lichess.org, Chess.com, or chess databases, and paste it directly into ChessCut Studio.
When you toggle the Classify switch on, our hybrid engine evaluates every position in your game using a tactical quiescence search and cloud evaluation data. It compares each move's win-probability delta and checks for deliberate piece sacrifices to assign badges such as Brilliant (!!), Great (!), Best, Book, Inaccuracy (?!), Mistake (?), Miss, or Blunder (??). You can also override or remove any badge manually.
All piece effects (Piece Vision rays, Move Classification badges, Sleeping/Scared animations, and Punch Drops) are scoped strictly to the specific half-move (ply) where you apply them. As soon as the timeline advances to the next move, the board transitions cleanly to the next keyframe.
Yes. When you select a piece and open the Piece Vision settings upward menu, you can switch between Staircase Ray (stops at blocking pieces), X-Ray Line (pierces through blocking pieces), and Custom Paint, which lets you tap individual squares within the piece's vision to paint or unpaint them.