"Something like that reel, but faster" is not a folder you can search

A creative director sends a link to a reel from three years ago and asks for "that energy, but faster," and the honest answer is that you saved something close to it at the time — a GIF, a screen recording, a downloaded clip — into a folder named after whatever the job was called then. Finding it again is not a creative problem. It is a search problem wearing a creative deadline.

Where motion reference actually accumulates

Most working motion designers are not curating a mood library so much as generating one as a side effect of every project: screen recordings of ads that nailed a transition, GIFs saved off a group chat, style frames exported from a pitch deck that never shipped, competitors' reels downloaded for a client kickoff. Each folder made sense on the day it was made. None of them were named for the question "what did dynamic kinetic type on a dark background look like the last time I solved this," which is the question that actually comes up two years later.

A transition, found by what it is rather than which job it was for

Tag a clip by the technique it shows the moment you save it — kinetic-type, whip-transition, liquid-blend — and the query line reaches it later regardless of which job's folder or which drive it lives on: type:video narrows to footage, tag:any:a,b matches either tag, rating:>=4 keeps the results to clips that actually held up. AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses.

tag:any:type-reveal has:notes            annotated type-reveal reference
type:video -is:favourite rating:>=3      good clips not already pinned
added:>2026-01 tag:any:liquid-blend      this year's liquid-blend folder

A term the parser does not recognise renders as free text rather than an error, so a half-remembered word — the client's name, the agency that made the ad — still returns something to narrow down from.

Style frames and the clips they came from, kept in one place

A still pulled from a reel to pitch a look and the reel itself do not need separate systems. Export the frame into the same folder as the source clip, tag both the same way, and tag:any:liquid-blend returns the frame and the footage together — useful in a deck where a still sells the palette faster than a clip loading would, without losing the motion reference that actually explains how it moves.

Rating what actually survived a pitch

A downloaded reel and a screen recording of a competitor's ad are not equally useful a year later, and the gap is rarely visible from the filename alone. Rating a clip after it has actually been used in a pitch or a treatment — four stars for a transition that became the reference for a shipped spot, one star for something that read well at the time but never held up on a second look — turns rating:>=4 into a shortlist worth reaching for first, instead of a re-scroll through every reel ever downloaded.

GIFs, screen recordings and downloads, searched as one library

Motion reference does not arrive in one format. A GIF saved from a group chat, a screen recording of a broadcast package, a clip downloaded straight off a competitor's reel — all of it can sit in the same registered workspace without converting anything first, and type:video tag:any:type-reveal returns whichever one actually matches, regardless of the format it arrived in or the folder it landed in.

Building a technique library that outlasts any one job

A motion designer's reference tends to outlive the pitch it was gathered for, and a folder structure built around one client's naming convention does not travel to the next job. Tagging by the technique a clip demonstrates — whip pan, liquid blend, type reveal — rather than filing only by client or project turns the whole archive into something closer to a searchable technique index, which holds up regardless of what the next brief happens to be called.

tag:any:whip-pan,type-reveal rating:>=4     technique studies, rated
tag:any:client-2025 -tag:archived           still-active client folder

A tag naming the move rather than the job means old reference does not need refiling the day a new project starts; it is already findable by what it actually shows.

Sharing reference across a small studio

A small motion team pitching the same brief together does not need a shared database to search the same reference — pointing each machine's Coii Ref install at the same reference folder over a network share the studio already has gives every workstation its own local index of the same files, so a tag one designer applies while researching a pitch is visible to the next person who searches the same folder, without a server to run or an account to set up for the team.

Presenting reference in a pitch without building a separate deck

Pulling reference into a slide deck for a pitch is its own small project every time, and the deck is usually thrown away the moment the pitch is over. A .coii-canvas does the same job without the throwaway step: arrange the strongest clips and style frames on a canvas, present straight from it, and the file stays in the project folder afterward as a record of what was actually shown, rather than a slide deck nobody can find again by the time a similar brief comes around.

What happens to reference a client sends directly

Not all motion reference originates from personal research — a client's own inspiration reel, a brand guideline deck exported as stills, screenshots a creative director drops into a shared folder mid-review. None of that needs special handling: drop it into the project workspace already registered, and the watcher picks it up on its own, ready to tag alongside anything gathered independently. There is no inbox to manage and no import step for a handful of new files arriving mid-project.

Comparing this to keeping everything in After Effects project files

Reference kept only inside a project file — imported footage, comps built purely for mood — does not survive the project being archived or deleted once a job wraps, and searching across a dozen archived projects for one clip is not something project files are built to do. Coii Ref works the other way: reference lives as ordinary files in an ordinary folder, findable by tag and rating long after the project that first needed it has shipped and been put away.

Where a reference library actually lives

Everything Coii Ref writes for a clip-heavy library — the index, thumbnails, and canvas-ready proxies — sits inside the folder you registered, not in an application-support directory or an account. That matters for reference gathered across years of freelance and studio work specifically because the whole searchable library moves with the folder: copy it to a new Mac, register it there, and the tags and ratings are exactly where they were.

Working between a home setup and a studio machine

Freelancers who keep a personal reference archive at home and work on a studio-issued machine during a contract do not need one workspace to cover both. Register the personal archive on a personal Mac and, separately, the studio's shared reference drive on the studio machine — each one builds and keeps its own local index, with nothing to sync and no account tying the two together. Licensing covers three Macs on one purchase, which in practice covers a home machine, a laptop and a studio seat without paying twice.

Comparing this to a library tool that copies everything in

Eagle is a genuinely capable option for the same job and copies whatever is imported into its own managed library, which some motion designers prefer because everything then lives in one place the app fully controls. Coii Ref takes the opposite approach on purpose: it indexes the reference folders exactly where they already sit, so a clip pulled into an After Effects project by its file path never silently points at a copy somewhere else.

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 rather than one shared binary.

The app's entire 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 and therefore 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 and the folder watcher all keep working permanently on what is already indexed.

Keeping a technique library that survives a change of software

A motion designer's collection of studied techniques tends to outlast whichever compositing or animation package renders it at the time, and a reference set built around one tool's project format does not travel well when the pipeline changes. Keeping style frames and clips as ordinary files in an ordinary folder, tagged by the move they demonstrate rather than by which software eventually renders the result, means the personal technique library survives every tool change a career will see — registering the same folder again after switching packages costs one re-index, not a rebuild of years of studied reference.

What an old pitch's reference is still worth

A treatment that never got greenlit does not take its reference clips down with it, provided they were tagged by technique rather than only by the job they were gathered for. A liquid-blend study saved for a pitch that never shipped is exactly as useful the next time a liquid blend comes up on an unrelated brief, found by tag:any:liquid-blend regardless of which client folder it happened to sit in.

Who this actually suits

Anyone whose reference is genuinely a mix of screen recordings, GIFs and downloaded reels accumulated across more jobs than any one folder structure was built to hold. If the daily need is closer to full library management — an on-device tagger that suggests tags on its own, or search by meaning rather than by the tag you actually applied — refern is the more capable app on those specific fronts and is worth weighing directly. For the video-specific behaviour underneath this page — how proxies and formats are actually handled — the video reference manager page covers it in more depth, and the animator-focused page covers a related but different job built around motion study rather than pitch reference. A wider field of options sits at the video reference manager round-up, and the general reference-manager page makes the underlying search argument without the pitch-deadline framing this page leads with.

Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account: download it and point it at whichever folder has been accumulating reels the longest. Tag the clips that actually made it into a pitch first — that is the search that pays off the next time somebody asks for "something like that, but faster."