Moving references, found by describing them.

Refcut is a search engine for shots. Describe what you have in mind — two people hugging on a platform at night, a slow push-in on a face by a window — and it returns the moments in real films that show it, not just whole videos.

Every result opens the original film on YouTube or Vimeo at the exact second the shot begins: you watch the reference where it lives, with its sound, in its own context and with its credits. To show you the shots before that, Refcut keeps small still frames and a short, silent, low-resolution clip of each shot that plays when you point at a card.

What is inside

Commercials, short films and music videos — including Cannes Lions winners and shortlists in Film and Film Craft. The base keeps growing.

How it works

Every film is cut into its shots, and each shot is described by an AI model from four of its frames: what happens, the framing, the light, the mood.

Fast search matches your words against those descriptions — instantly, for free. Smart search goes one step further: a vision model looks at the frames of the best candidates and keeps only the shots that really show what you asked for.

Who it is for

Directors, creative directors, cinematographers, production designers, editors, art directors — anyone putting together a treatment or a mood board. Save shots into projects, write down why each one matters, and send the whole board to your crew.

Refcut is made by a film director and is in open testing. It changes often. If something is missing or wrong, tell us.

How to use Refcut

Describe the shot

Write what you would say to your cinematographer: who is in it, what happens, where, the light, the camera. woman laughing in a car at night, close-up finds more than a single word. Plain English works best. Press Enter to search.

Fast and Smart

Fast matches your words against the description of every shot. It is instant, free and unlimited.

Smart also lets an AI model look at the frames of the best candidates, and throws out the ones that do not really match. It takes a few seconds and uses one credit. Every visitor gets 20 free credits — the number left is shown next to the Smart button. A search someone has already made comes back at once and costs nothing.

A Smart page has two parts: first the shots the model confirmed, then — below a line that says so — close matches from the free search that it did not check. Show more sends the next set of unchecked shots to the model for one more credit; it is offered only when the first page found enough for "more" to mean more of the same.

Search with a picture

Press the camera in the search bar and choose a picture — or paste one with ⌘V, or drop a file onto the bar. Refcut shows the shots that look most like it: the light, the colours, the framing, what is in the frame. A still from a film, a screenshot, a photo from your phone all work. It is free and instant.

Words typed beside the picture narrow where it looks — cannes 2019, nike ad, long take — while the picture itself decides the order. Press ✕ on the picture to go back to searching with words.

Filters

The buttons under the search bar come in opposite pairs — Day / Night, Wide / Close-up, INT / EXT (interior, exterior), Warm / Cold — and narrow your search to shots that are that way. Both halves of a pair on means either.

Searches that narrow the base

Some words limit the results to exactly one set of films. Add a description after them to search inside that set.

• nike ad — one brand's films. a ball in the nike ad searches inside them; a brand name on its own, like nike, shows its whole channel.
• cannes lions 2019 gold — Cannes Lions winners, by year, award (Grand Prix, Gold, Silver, Bronze, Shortlist) and category, for example cannes lions film craft cinematography.
• long take, fast cutting, 3 cuts per second — the cutting rhythm, measured from the film itself.
• 30 second ad — films of about that length.
• A person's name — messi, nadal serving, even misspelt. The answer comes in bands: first the shots where they appear, then the films whose description names them. When no film of ours names the person the page says so rather than showing something else.

Projects

Press + on any shot to save it to a project; the first time, it asks which one, and after that change in the note at the top moves it somewhere else. On a computer you can also drag a shot from the results straight onto a project in the list on the left. Open a project from that list (behind ☰ on a phone). Under each saved shot you can write why you chose it; its + adds it to another project, or takes it off this one. Take a shot by the six dots on its picture to move it to another place on the board. In the big window, the small chain icon beside the title copies a link that opens that one shot. On a board the search bar folds away and the row with Share and the link field stays in place while you scroll; the refcut logo at the top left brings the search back.

On a board, a small bar floats at the bottom of the page: the house takes you back to the top of the board; the magnifier searches inside the board — every word you type has to appear, as the start of a word, in the shot's description, its title or channel, or your own note ("run" finds running, not brunch). It is instant and free; Esc closes it.

Press Editing mode on a board to trim it. The amber strip under each shot is its in and out: drag the ends to choose which seconds play, drag the middle to slide them, double-click to go back to the whole shot.

Editing mode turns the top of the page into an editing table: the filters fold away and a monitor takes the top right, with its buttons under it — back, play / pause, forward and loop in the middle, Done on the left and Share on the right (the board's own name in the list on the left does what Done does); the board's Sequence runs across the whole width below. A long board is drawn small enough to fit; once you move its amber ends in, the strip zooms to what plays, with three shots either side — ‹ N and N › show the rest. A search while you edit lands in the space under the search bar, in small cards, and the board stays where it is: press + on a found shot and it goes straight onto the end of the board; drag it onto the strip or between two of the board's shots and it goes where you drop it; its tick — on the found shot or on the board — takes it off again. The line between the found shots and the monitor can be pulled sideways, and the line above the timeline up or down, to make the monitor and the found shots bigger or smaller — the timeline and the board follow; a double-click puts a line back. Drag along the strip to wind through the whole board: the monitor shows the frame under the white line, and play (or the space bar) plays it there, cut to cut. Back goes to the start of the shot, then to the one before; loop plays the board round and round; ⤢ in the monitor's corner plays the same montage full screen from that second. Click a shot on the board and it plays on the monitor; double-click opens the film. While a shot's in or out is being dragged, the monitor shows that frame. The strip's amber ends are the board's own in and out — the first and the last shot that play. Done brings back the plain page.

▶ Play board plays the shots one after another, each from its in to its out, from the board's in to its out. Take hold of the line under the picture to wind through it; a press on the picture pauses and plays.

Signed in, your projects follow your account to every device. Without an account they are kept in this browser only, and clearing the browser's data for this site deletes them.

Add your own references

Open a project and paste a YouTube or Vimeo link into the field beside its buttons. A link that carries a time, like &t=41, is saved as that exact moment.

Build a board from a script

The page icon inside the search field opens the script reader. Paste an English script or shot list: Refcut splits it into scenes and finds shots for each one, straight into a project. Reading the script uses a small part of your free credits. After that, Fast is free; Smart checks every shot by eye and tells you what it will cost before it starts.

Share a project

Open a project and press Share this project. Signed in, you get a link — anyone who has it sees the board, on a phone as well, and every shot plays at its second. The link follows the board: add or remove shots and it shows the change. Stop sharing in the same window makes the link stop working.

Choose Montage in that window — or press share while the board is playing — and the link opens straight into the montage, each shot from its in to its out.

The same window still offers Download as a file: one file with every shot, its picture and your notes, for sending without a link. Open it in a web browser rather than a file preview.

A video will not play

Some owners do not allow their films to be played on other sites. Use open source ↗︎ under the player to watch it on YouTube or Vimeo.

Something is wrong

A bad result, a broken film, or a film that should not be here — write to us.

Write to us

Feedback, a bug, a film that should not be here, or an idea for what to add — every message is read. You can also write straight to [email protected].

To have a film removed, choose Remove a film and paste its link: we confirm within 2 working days and take it out of the index within 5. What you write here is kept only to answer it — see Privacy.

Privacy

Refcut has no ads and no tracking, and you can use it without an account. This page lists everything it keeps.

Searches

We keep the words of each search with its time, whether it was Fast or Smart, how many results it found and the two-letter code of the country it came from — to learn what people look for and what the base is missing. A search is not linked to your name, your IP address or your device.

A picture you search with is turned into a row of numbers on our server, compared with the shots, and discarded. To search the captions too, a smaller copy of it (at most 512 pixels) is sent to Anthropic, whose model describes it in a line of words; the search is logged with those words, and they are kept, tied to a fingerprint of the picture, so the same picture is never described twice. The picture itself is not stored, by us or by Anthropic.

Cookies

rc_vid is a random number that counts how many of your free Smart credits you have used. It lasts a year and says nothing about who you are. If you sign in, rc_session keeps you signed in for 30 days. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

Signing in

Signing in is optional, and there are two ways to do it. With Google, Google tells us your name, your email address and your profile picture; we never see your Google password. With an email and a password, we keep the address and a one-way scramble of the password — the password itself is never stored and cannot be read back, not even by us. Either way we keep a count of the credits you have used.

Confirmation and password-reset codes are sent through Resend, an email service that handles the sending for us.

Your IP address

So that free credits stay fair, the server turns your IP address into a one-way code and keeps that code until the end of the day, only to count how many free allowances were opened from one address. The address itself is never stored.

Projects and notes

Your projects and the notes under your shots are stored in your own browser. If you sign in, they are also kept with your account, so that they follow you to every device; nobody else sees them unless you share one by link. A shared project is saved on our server under your account (its name, the shots and your notes) so that the link can show it, and it stays there until you press Stop sharing or delete your account. Anyone who has the link can see it; we do not list shared projects anywhere. When you paste a link into a project, our server asks YouTube or Vimeo for that video's title and picture.

Smart search and scripts

Smart search and the script reader use Anthropic's Claude models: the words you search, or the script you paste, are sent to Anthropic to be read. We do not store scripts. The searches made from a script are kept like any other search.

Messages

A message sent from the contact page is kept so we can answer it, together with the name and email you choose to give.

Videos

Films play in YouTube's and Vimeo's own players. When you open a shot, that service loads and its own privacy policy applies, including its cookies — Google's for YouTube, Vimeo's for Vimeo.

Where it runs

The site runs on a server in Helsinki, Finland, behind Cloudflare, which passes requests on and serves the thumbnails and the short preview clips from its own network; Cloudflare sees the traffic as any network provider does, under its own privacy policy. Our server keeps no logs of visitors' IP addresses (only the one-day code described above), and the site loads no advertising or third-party fonts.

Your choices

To delete your projects, clear this site's data in your browser. To ask what we keep, or to have a message deleted, write to us or mail [email protected].

Terms of use

What Refcut is

Refcut is a search index of shots in films their owners have published on YouTube and Vimeo. To show you each shot it keeps small still frames and a short, silent, low-resolution clip of the shot — ten seconds at most — which plays when you point at a card or play a board. The film itself — with its sound, in full quality and with its credits — is always watched on YouTube or Vimeo, where its owner published it. Refcut does not offer films for download.

The films belong to their owners

All rights in the films, frames, names and brands stay with their owners. Everything on Refcut is for reference use only — to study a shot, save it to a project, share a board with your crew or client, and use it in a treatment, mood board or pitch. It is not a licence: you may not put any frame, preview or footage found through Refcut into a finished film, advertisement or other published work. Using footage in your own work needs permission from whoever owns it.

Removing a film

If you own a film and do not want it on Refcut, write to us or mail [email protected] with its link. We confirm that your request has arrived within 2 working days, and within 5 working days we remove the film — from the search, together with its frames, its clips and its descriptions — and it is not added again.

Please use it fairly

Do not scrape the site, send automated searches, or try to get around the free credit limit. Free credits are part of testing and can change at any time.

Open testing

Refcut is in open testing and is provided as it is, without guarantees: results can be wrong, films can disappear from YouTube or Vimeo, and features can change or stop. Projects are kept in your browser, and on your account when you are signed in; a project that was only in a browser cannot be recovered if that browser loses it.

Changes

These terms can change as Refcut grows. The date above shows when they last did. Questions: write to us.