drivelibraryFor Mac

DriveLibrary

Every shot on every drive, found in seconds.

DriveLibrary reads your footage drives once and remembers what is on them: every clip and every frame, every word said, every face, and what is inside every project and document. Search all of it with the drives back on the shelf.

In use at RIOT now. One email when it is ready for you, nothing else.

harbour at dusk, wide

Clips 14

A003_C011.movARCHIVE_07
Harbour_Wide_02.movSHOOT_2024_B
A003_C014.movARCHIVE_07
DJI_0412.mp4B_ROLL_03

What was said 3

00:14:52“we wait for the harbour lights, then go wide on the boats”Interview_Day2.mov · SHOOT_2024_B

Drives 2

2024-014SHOOT_2024_BStudio, shelf 3

Which drive was that on?

We are RIOT, a creative agency in New York. Years of shoots live on 253 drives and four network storage boxes. We wrote tags on the drives in marker, kept a catalogue of file names, and still plugged in drive after drive to find one clip, one line of an interview, one project.

So we built the library we wanted. It reads a drive once and remembers what is inside it, not just what it is called.

Before

  • A tag in marker and a spreadsheet nobody updates
  • Five drives plugged in to find one clip
  • Scrubbing an hour of interview for one line
  • Opening a project to see what it needs
  • No idea which work exists only once

With DriveLibrary

  • Every drive tagged, placed and on its shelf spot
  • One search, with the drives back in their boxes
  • The line found, and the second it was said
  • Every clip, font and plugin a project uses, before you open it
  • The single-copy work flagged, so it gets copied

What it reads

More than any catalogue. It looks inside.

Footage

Every clip, looked at properly

  • Nine frames from every clip as a contact sheet, kept big enough to enlarge
  • R3D and BRAW decoded with the camera makers' own decoders and shown in proper colour, not flat log
  • MXF, ProRes, MPEG-2, AVI, DXV and the rest played in the app, with a playable copy made on your Mac when macOS can't
  • Image sequences as the one shot they are: range, frame count, missing frames
  • The sound of every clip kept, so it can be heard and searched with the drive unplugged

Words

Search what is inside, not just file names

  • Everything said on camera, transcribed on your Mac, found to the second
  • The text inside PDF, Word, Pages, Keynote, PowerPoint, Excel, Numbers, Markdown and plain text files
  • Subtitles and captions, Finder tags and comments, and where each file was downloaded from
  • Search a line of dialogue, a client's name in a deck, or a word in a title card

Projects

Inside the project files

  • Premiere Pro: titles, markers, captions, the transcripts Premiere made, and every clip used
  • After Effects: comps, layers, text layers and the render queue
  • Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Audition, Motion, Nuke, motion graphics templates, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Sketch and Lightroom
  • Final Cut XML, EDL and ALE
  • Which drives a project needs before anyone opens it, which projects used a clip, every font and plugin a project depends on

Camera

What the camera knew

  • Camera, serial number, lens, ISO, white balance, shutter, gamma and gamut
  • Timecode, reel, and the frame rate it was shot at, so slow motion is marked
  • The sidecar files cameras write beside the clips, and the checksums taken when the card was offloaded
  • All of it searchable: find every clip from one camera body, or everything shot in one log

People

Who is in it

  • Faces found in every clip and photo, grouped by likeness, named only by you
  • Confirm one face and the rest of that burst of stills comes with it
  • Before a group gets a name you see whether it might be more than one person, so brothers, sisters and children are not filed as one
  • Face data never leaves your Mac, and can be switched off or deleted

Drives

The drives themselves

  • Model, serial number, health and the hours it has run, read from the disk wherever its enclosure passes them on
  • A tag for every drive in order for its year, its place and its spot on the shelf, and a check that the label is really on it
  • Network storage under the NAS it lives on, recognised by the box itself, so renaming a share changes nothing
  • What changed since the drive was last read, and a full check of every byte that writes nothing

Copies

What exists once, and what exists three times

  • Every file matched across every drive
  • The work that lives on a single disk, so you know what to copy before it fails
  • Two copies in the same building flagged: one fire takes both
  • The space you could get back from copies you do not need

Kept

Yours, and backed up

  • The library lives on your Mac and backs itself up to your NAS or a disk you choose
  • Full-size pictures can live on the backup, with small copies on your Mac for browsing
  • Restored on a new Mac with every tag, place and name intact

Reads

The files you actually work with.

Camera

  • R3D
  • BRAW
  • MXF
  • ProRes
  • H.264 and HEVC
  • MPEG-2
  • AVI
  • DXV
  • Image sequences
  • Camera RAW photos
  • Sidecar XML
  • Offload checksums

Projects

  • Premiere Pro
  • After Effects
  • Pro Tools
  • Ableton Live
  • Audition
  • Motion
  • Nuke
  • Motion graphics templates
  • Final Cut XML
  • EDL
  • ALE

Design

  • Photoshop
  • Illustrator
  • InDesign
  • Sketch
  • Lightroom
  • Fonts
  • LUTs

Documents

  • PDF
  • Word
  • Pages
  • Keynote
  • PowerPoint
  • Excel
  • Numbers
  • Markdown
  • Subtitles

How it works

  1. 01

    Plug in a drive

    DriveLibrary reads it where it is, and never writes to it, moves or changes a thing on it.

  2. 02

    Let it read

    Clips, frames, sound, faces, projects. A big drive takes a while; you can keep working.

  3. 03

    Label it

    It gives the drive its tag, the next in order for its year. Write it on the drive, confirm it, and say where the drive lives.

  4. 04

    Put it back on the shelf

    Everything you need to find it again stays on your Mac. When you need the drive itself, the tag tells you which box.

Your footage stays yours.

DriveLibrary runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded: not your footage, not its pictures, not what was said in it, not the faces in it. It reads your drives without changing them, and keeps its own copy safe on the NAS or disk you choose.

Questions

Does it work with the drives unplugged?

That is the point of it. Once a drive has been read, everything DriveLibrary learned stays on your Mac: the pictures, the sound, what was said, who is in it, what is in its projects. Plug the drive in only when you need the file itself.

Can I use it on client footage under NDA?

Yes. DriveLibrary runs on your Mac and sends nothing anywhere: not your footage, not its pictures or transcripts, not the faces in it. We built it for our own client archive, which is full of work under NDA.

Is anything uploaded, or used to train AI?

No. Transcription and face grouping run on your Mac. There is no account and no cloud, and we never see your library.

Is it a backup?

No, it is a library of what is on your drives. It does show you which work exists on only one drive, so you know what to back up, and it keeps its own library backed up to a NAS or disk you choose.

Does it change anything on my drives?

Never. It reads a drive where it is and writes nothing to it. It can also read every byte of a drive to check it still reads, without writing a thing.

Does it work with a NAS?

Yes. Network shares are read like drives and grouped under the NAS they live on, recognised by the box itself, so renaming a share changes nothing.

What Mac do I need?

A Mac with Apple silicon, running macOS 13 Ventura or later.

What will it cost?

We will say when it is ready. People on the list hear first.

Be first to use it.