Getting started
What ChartBuilder is
An animated-chart studio for traders who teach: draw a chart, annotate it, reveal it candle by candle, export a video.
ChartBuilder is a studio for one specific kind of video: a candlestick chart that reveals itself bar by bar while you explain what happened. It is not a charting platform and not a video editor, and it is deliberately bad at being either.
What it does
You build a chart — by hand on a snap grid, from a generated block of realistic price action, or from a CSV of real data. You annotate it with zones, levels, arrows and text. You decide when each of those arrives, where the camera looks, and what is said over the top. Then you export an MP4 or a GIF sized for the platform you are posting to.
The whole thing runs in your browser. Your projects live on your own device, exports are encoded locally, and nothing is uploaded for rendering — which is also why an export takes as long as your machine takes rather than as long as a queue.
What it is not
A teaching tool, not a terminal
There is no live market data, no broker connection, no indicator library and no backtesting. A chart here is something you composed to make a point, the same way a diagram in a textbook is drawn rather than measured. If you import real OHLC data, it is a file you brought.
That constraint is the point. A real charting platform gives you every instrument and no control over how the picture animates. Here it is the reverse: one chart, and complete control of how it is revealed.
The one rule worth knowing early
What the Output pane shows is what the file will contain. Preview and export run the same drawing code — there is no separate render path that could quietly differ.
The Editor pane is another matter. It always shows the whole chart, ignores the camera, and carries handles, hover rings, snap markers and timing pills that exist only to be grabbed. None of that reaches the file. Throughout these docs the split is called out explicitly, because it is the thing most worth knowing and the easiest to forget.
Where to go next
If you want to build something now, the quickstart gets you to an exported file. If you would rather understand the layout first, read the editor at a glance.