How to annotate a board game recording with the real moves
Ask Vizard Agent to read the board before it writes anything. Commentary generated from the look of a chess recording produces confident sentences about moves that were never played, which anybody who plays the game will spot in the first ten seconds. Vizard Agent decodes the board frame by frame and marks only the moments the game actually turned.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Ask for real moves explicitly. Without that instruction the narration comes out atmospheric and non-specific: "a devastating attack develops". That is exactly what generic commentary sounds like, and exactly why an audience of players doesn't believe a word of it.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
The title card, the analysis and the marks all depend on knowing what was actually played, so most of the first half goes on reading the board. Sampling at regular intervals catches pieces mid-slide, and a board read during an animation is a position that never existed. In the session behind this article it:
- Opened an 87-second chess recording, sampled the whole sequence rather than only the opening, and built a timestamped board contact sheet to trace the move order.
- Decoded the board positions frame by frame, then found the first pass had been sampling during the piece animation and isolated the settled positions.
- Refined the decoder to separate black and white pieces, recovered a clean move list and extracted the settled positions across the whole recording.
- Had the footage checked for its turning points so the marks landed on real ones, then generated the music bed and the analytical narration.
- Measured both stems so the narration led and the music stayed under it, and assembled the cut from Black's side with title and phase cards.
- Shortened the narration twice so the closing line landed inside the board animation, rather than speeding the board up.
When does this not work well?
Some recordings can't be decoded. A board at a steep angle, a heavily compressed capture or an unusual piece set makes the reading unreliable, and unreliable reading is worse than none, because the commentary sounds just as confident. Very fast play leaves few settled frames between moves, and overlays or cursors sit on top of the squares.
Common questions
Does it work for other games? Yes. Vizard Agent reads any game whose state is visible, such as draughts, Go or open-hand card games.
What if I have the notation already? Give it to Vizard Agent and it checks the recording against it.
Will it claim a move was brilliant if it was not? Not if the marks come from the game, which is why Vizard Agent decodes it first.