The supervisor wants "the overcast lighting from the show before this one"

A supervisor asks for reference matching a specific overcast, low-contrast lighting condition seen on a show that wrapped over a year ago, and whether that request gets answered in five minutes or fifty depends entirely on whether last year's dailies and plates are actually searchable, rather than only theoretically still sitting on an archive drive somewhere.

What a working VFX artist's plate library becomes across shows

It is rarely one clean archive. Plates pulled for lighting reference, dailies kept because a shot's grade worked and might work again, phone photos of a location scout, frames grabbed from a previous show's own finished work for continuity — all of it collecting in folders named after whichever show needed it at the time. That works fine for one show. It stops working the moment a new show needs "the overcast lighting from two shows ago," because the folder it lives in is named after a project that wrapped and archived long since.

A lighting condition, found across every show at once

Tag a plate or a still for the lighting condition it shows — overcast, golden-hour, low-contrast, top-lit — and it stays reachable regardless of which show's folder it lives in: type:video or type:image picks the media, tag:any:a,b matches either tag, rating:>=4 keeps it to reference that actually held up on a past show. AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses.

type:video ext:mov tag:any:golden-hour rating:>=3   graded plates, rated
has:notes no:tags                                    annotated but never filed
in:Show-Bravo tag:any:corridor                       one show's corridor plates only

A term the parser does not recognise renders as free text rather than an error, so a half-remembered word still returns something worth narrowing from.

Keeping a tag vocabulary consistent across shows

A career spanning several shows accumulates its own private shorthand for lighting and set conditions — "the overcast look from the Bravo job," "the practicals we matched on the corridor set" — and that shorthand only pays off if it is applied the same way every time rather than reinvented show to show. Deciding early that a lighting condition is always tagged by what it is rather than by which show first needed it means tag:any:overcast finds every relevant plate in one line two years from now, rather than finding half of them because half were filed under a slightly different word for the same condition. The tag itself is just text typed into the app; using the same word twice is the only discipline involved, and it is far cheaper to keep from the start than to fix retroactively across several shows of folders.

Renaming a tag later does not mean re-tagging every file by hand. A saved view built on a tag re-parses its query every time it opens, so correcting the tag on the files that carry it is enough — any view built against it simply reflects the fix from then on.

Working with a coordinator or a second artist on the same show drive

A show's plates rarely have one person touching the reference folder — a lead artist curating the lighting direction and a coordinator pulling dailies and turnover material through the week. Because the database, thumbnails and proxies all live inside the workspace folder on the studio drive itself rather than inside a separate account, a second person working from the same mounted drive sees the same tags and ratings the moment their own copy of the app re-scans the folder — there is no server keeping two people in sync, only the same folder both machines happen to be reading. Licensing covers three Macs on one purchase, which in practice covers a work machine, a laptop and a second seat without a second payment, though each machine keeps its own local index rather than updating live the way a hosted tool would.

Boarding a shortlist for one shot's lighting reference

Dragging a shortlist onto a canvas turns it into a .coii-canvas file — pretty-printed JSON saved wherever the show's other working files already live, next to the shot's comp script rather than inside a separate application's storage. It names the images and clips it uses without copying them, so the board can move to another drive with the project folder and be sent over the studio's shared drive along with the rest of a shot's turnover.

Video and stills in the same search, because a plate is rarely just one frame

A lighting reference is sometimes a single still and sometimes a full clip of how light moved across a surface through a take, and Coii Ref does not split the two into separate modes. type:video ext:mov reaches footage the same way type:image reaches stills, both take tags and ratings the same way, and a canvas can put a still key frame beside the clip it was pulled from without treating either as secondary. Proxies are written at canvas resolution beside the source files, so a board mixing plates and stills scrolls at the same speed either way.

Comparing this to a library that copies what you import

Some asset libraries copy every file into their own managed storage on import, which for plates measured in tens of gigabytes per show becomes a real cost — Eagle works this way, by its own documentation. Coii Ref never copies a plate anywhere: it reads files where a show's pipeline already put them and writes its database, thumbnails and proxies alongside them in the same workspace folder, so registering a show's existing archive costs an index pass rather than a second copy of every plate on the drive.

Comparing this to a reference pinned over the compositing app

A different, earlier stage of the job is pinning a single reference plate directly over a compositing or paint app while matching a grade, which is PureRef's job — always on top, transparent to mouse clicks, floating over whatever else is open. Coii Ref answers the question before that one: out of every past show's dailies and plates, which reference is actually the right one to pin to the floating board to begin with.

What it costs and what it runs on

$19 once, three Macs, updates included, nothing that renews. The trial runs 30 days with every feature enabled, no card and no account required to start. It needs macOS 11 Big Sur or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel, as two native builds.

The app's whole outbound network activity is a licence check on Activate and a launch-time read of a server's Date header, so a wound-back clock cannot extend a trial. There is no in-app updater, so no update check, and no analytics or crash reporting.

Past day thirty of an unpaid trial, growing the library — registering a new folder, running the importer, starting an index by hand — needs a licence. Search, tags, ratings, notes, canvases and the folder watcher all keep working permanently on whatever was already indexed.

Working across a studio pipeline machine and a personal archive

A show's plates usually live on a studio's own storage, indexed from a pipeline-managed workstation, while a personal reference archive built up across shows and studios over years lives on an artist's own machine. Coii Ref treats each folder registered as its own self-contained workspace, so the studio drive can be indexed on the work machine while a personal archive is indexed separately at home, with nothing syncing between the two and no account tying them together. Licensing covers three Macs on one purchase, which in practice covers a studio seat, a laptop and a home machine without a second payment.

What a cut shot's reference is still worth

A shot that gets cut from the edit does not have to take its lighting reference down with it, provided that reference was tagged by the condition it shows rather than only by the show it was gathered for. An overcast study pulled for a shot that never made the final cut is exactly as useful the next time an overcast condition comes up on an unrelated show, found by tag:any:overcast regardless of which show's folder it happened to sit in.

What a reference gathered at a previous studio is still worth

A career in VFX rarely stays at one studio, and reference gathered on a job at a previous employer is easy to lose track of once the contract ends and the project's own archive stays behind on the studio's server. A personal archive of location scouts, lighting studies and reference video built up independently of any one show's storage survives every studio change it will ever see, provided it was tagged by what it shows rather than only by the show it was gathered on. Registering that personal archive again on a new machine at a new studio costs one re-index, not a rebuilt collection.

The same habit pays off across an entire career rather than just one contract. An artist who has been saving lighting studies and location scouts across several studios has, without ever meaning to build one, a private catalogue that is often more specific to their own eye than any stock footage library — the exact conditions that actually got matched on a past show, not a generic category a stock site sells by the clip. That catalogue is only worth what it is worth once it can be searched by what is in the plate rather than by which studio's archive it happened to sit in, and a phone clip shot on a location scout is exactly as searchable as a graded plate pulled from a finished show once both carry the same tag, and neither one needs re-filing to become part of the same searchable archive.

Who this actually suits

Someone with a real accumulation of plates and dailies across more than one show, working to a turnover schedule where re-finding a lighting condition beats re-shooting or re-requesting one. If the daily habit is mostly a single plate pinned over a compositing app while matching a grade, PureRef answers that more directly. The fuller treatment of video specifically, across any creative field rather than VFX alone, is at the video reference manager page, and the animator page covers the motion-study side of the same footage habit. Against the most capable full library in this category, refern handles video the same way it handles stills and adds an on-device tagger this app does not have — both worth fifteen minutes if a bigger, pricier tool is still on the table.

Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account: download it and point it at whatever show archive has the deepest plate history already on it. Tag last show's strongest lighting references first — that is the search that answers "the overcast lighting from the show before this one" before the supervisor's note turns into a missed turnover.