Refs

Refs is a video reference library built for AI agents and the people who direct them. It gathers 3,032 films — launch films, motion pieces and explainers that moved people — and turns each one into measured analysis an agent can actually use. Instead of a mood board of links, Refs publishes cut-by-cut measurements, a 15-plate blueprint and a runnable prompt recipe for every film, so tools like Claude Code, Codex and Cursor can study what already worked and plan a new film from real references. Browsing is free, and the library is designed for marketers, motion designers, founders and developers who want their agent to plan a launch film from the real thing rather than from a vague description. Every creative brief runs into the same wall: language is a poor way to describe motion. Telling an agent to make a punchy 15-second launch film leaves out the timing, the shot lengths, the cuts per minute, the type treatment and the sound, so the model fills the gaps with guesses. Refs starts from the premise stated on its own homepage — Claude is only as good as the references you give it. By measuring successful films frame by frame and writing the findings down as structured plates and prompts, Refs gives an agent something concrete to reason from. The result is that Claude copies the method of a film that worked, never the footage, which keeps the output original while grounding it in evidence rather than vibes. The core of Refs is a measured archive. Each film in the library is broken down shot by shot, with shot boundaries found frame by frame so you can click any shot and jump straight to it. Every entry carries its own numbers: a shot index such as 01 / 10, cuts per minute (for example 36), and average shot length (for example 1.5 seconds). A cut map runs beneath the player, and you can hover a film to play it or move across it to scrub through its cuts; on a phone you simply tap. Scrub-anywhere playback makes it possible to compare pacing across many films quickly, and search runs across the whole archive, so you can pull up every film studied from a given company or explore by keyword. Beyond measurement, each film is written up as a 15-plate blueprint — a structured document of what the film does and how it does it. The plates cover hook, beats, shots, type, colour, sound and script. Specific plates named on the site include Format, which describes what the film is in one breath; Card, which gives length, pace, shots and sound at a glance; Hook, which breaks the first two seconds down frame by frame; and a final plate titled Make it yours, which shows how to swap the story but keep the method. The blueprint is a flip-through deck rather than a static report, with 15 plates per film, so an agent or a designer can walk from the hook to the edit in a defined sequence and see the decisions in the order they were made. Refs also groups films by format and publishes formulas: the patterns that the strong films of one format share. Named formulas in the library include The Price of Regret, The Music-Led Motion Showreel, The Dark Staged Product Reveal, The Live-Drawn Paradox, The Fifteen-Second Service Rescue, The Sonified Chart Relay and The Capability Proof Montage. Each formula is backed by a set of films — the site lists, for example, eight films under the dark staged product reveal, ten under the music-led motion showreel and seven under the live-drawn paradox. In total Refs reports 28 formulas across the archive, which gives an agent a way to reason about a whole format rather than a single example. Every film also comes with a prompt recipe that Claude can run. The recipes are written as concrete, executable instructions rather than descriptions. One example published on the site opens: Use Remotion to create an original 15-second, 60 fps motion-design showreel for {{PRODUCT}}, then lists timed beats — 0–1.9 s a point grows into the mark inside faint circular guides; 1.9–3.4 a full-screen shape wipe reveals a huge product title; 3.4–5.6 a warm-ivory process chart — and continues through the piece. Because the recipe is parameterised with placeholders such as {{PRODUCT}}, the structure travels to your own product while the timing and craft stay intact. You paste the recipe into Claude Code and make it yours. Refs connects to an agent through an MCP server. One command adds it: claude mcp add --transport http refs https://refs.video/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer $REFS_KEY". The site notes that the same integration works with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. Once connected, the agent has a search tool — the transcript on the homepage shows refs.search_videos being called with queries such as founder launch, kinetic type, silent demo, three.js and terminal — and can pull blueprints and formulas back into its context. As the FAQ puts it, Claude can then search the archive, pull blueprints and formulas, and plan your film from real references. That is the whole workflow: ask for a film, let the agent study what already worked, then build. The distinctive move is that Refs does not host the videos. Every film plays from its original post and stays its maker's; Refs publishes only its own measurements and analysis, and credits and links every source. That keeps the library respectful of the original work while still letting an agent study it, and it also means the blueprint teaches method rather than footage — as the site says, Claude copies the method, never the footage. In practice that produces original work grounded in evidence: instead of a generic AI video, you get a plan shaped by timed beats, measured pacing and structural plates drawn from films that demonstrably reached an audience. The most obvious use case is a launch film. A team asks Claude for a launch video, the agent searches Refs for founder-led launches or dark staged product reveals, reads the matching blueprints and formulas, and returns a plan with timed beats and a prompt recipe that can be built in a tool like Remotion. Other workflows follow the same shape: planning a motion design showreel, structuring an explainer, building a 15-second service rescue spot, or reverse-engineering why a competitor's teaser feels fast. Because browsing is free, designers also use the archive directly — scrubbing films, reading cut maps and comparing cuts per minute — to learn pacing by eye before they ever open an editor. Refs is aimed at people who plan and produce films with AI: founders and marketing teams making launch videos, motion designers and editors studying pacing, and developers who already work inside Claude Code, Codex or Cursor. The archive is free to browse forever and includes every film playable from its source, cut maps, hover-scrub, the numbers behind each film, the first plates of every blueprint and full archive search. Pro is $10 a month billed yearly, or $16 monthly, and opens all 15 plates of every blueprint, a runnable recipe for every film, formulas across films of one format, and the Refs MCP for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor with 1,500 credits a month. A Product Hunt launch code, PRODUCTHUNT, takes 50% off a year of Pro. The takeaway is simple: agents write better films when they are given better references, and Refs is the reference library built for exactly that. It packages 3,032 films, 67,695 measured shots and 28 formulas into blueprints and prompt recipes an agent can search and run, so make me a launch film becomes a plan drawn from work that already moved people. Same Claude — better references.