new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Nov 3

MotionCanvas: Cinematic Shot Design with Controllable Image-to-Video Generation

This paper presents a method that allows users to design cinematic video shots in the context of image-to-video generation. Shot design, a critical aspect of filmmaking, involves meticulously planning both camera movements and object motions in a scene. However, enabling intuitive shot design in modern image-to-video generation systems presents two main challenges: first, effectively capturing user intentions on the motion design, where both camera movements and scene-space object motions must be specified jointly; and second, representing motion information that can be effectively utilized by a video diffusion model to synthesize the image animations. To address these challenges, we introduce MotionCanvas, a method that integrates user-driven controls into image-to-video (I2V) generation models, allowing users to control both object and camera motions in a scene-aware manner. By connecting insights from classical computer graphics and contemporary video generation techniques, we demonstrate the ability to achieve 3D-aware motion control in I2V synthesis without requiring costly 3D-related training data. MotionCanvas enables users to intuitively depict scene-space motion intentions, and translates them into spatiotemporal motion-conditioning signals for video diffusion models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of real-world image content and shot-design scenarios, highlighting its potential to enhance the creative workflows in digital content creation and adapt to various image and video editing applications.

EditIQ: Automated Cinematic Editing of Static Wide-Angle Videos via Dialogue Interpretation and Saliency Cues

We present EditIQ, a completely automated framework for cinematically editing scenes captured via a stationary, large field-of-view and high-resolution camera. From the static camera feed, EditIQ initially generates multiple virtual feeds, emulating a team of cameramen. These virtual camera shots termed rushes are subsequently assembled using an automated editing algorithm, whose objective is to present the viewer with the most vivid scene content. To understand key scene elements and guide the editing process, we employ a two-pronged approach: (1) a large language model (LLM)-based dialogue understanding module to analyze conversational flow, coupled with (2) visual saliency prediction to identify meaningful scene elements and camera shots therefrom. We then formulate cinematic video editing as an energy minimization problem over shot selection, where cinematic constraints determine shot choices, transitions, and continuity. EditIQ synthesizes an aesthetically and visually compelling representation of the original narrative while maintaining cinematic coherence and a smooth viewing experience. Efficacy of EditIQ against competing baselines is demonstrated via a psychophysical study involving twenty participants on the BBC Old School dataset plus eleven theatre performance videos. Video samples from EditIQ can be found at https://editiq-ave.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 4

ShotBench: Expert-Level Cinematic Understanding in Vision-Language Models

Cinematography, the fundamental visual language of film, is essential for conveying narrative, emotion, and aesthetic quality. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong general visual understanding, their proficiency in comprehending the nuanced cinematic grammar embedded within individual shots remains largely unexplored and lacks robust evaluation. This critical gap limits both fine-grained visual comprehension and the precision of AI-assisted video generation. To address this, we introduce ShotBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for cinematic language understanding. It features over 3.5k expert-annotated QA pairs from images and video clips, meticulously curated from over 200 acclaimed (predominantly Oscar-nominated) films and spanning eight key cinematography dimensions. Our evaluation of 24 leading VLMs on ShotBench reveals their substantial limitations: even the top-performing model achieves less than 60% average accuracy, particularly struggling with fine-grained visual cues and complex spatial reasoning. To catalyze advancement in this domain, we construct ShotQA, a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising approximately 70k cinematic QA pairs. Leveraging ShotQA, we develop ShotVL through supervised fine-tuning and Group Relative Policy Optimization. ShotVL significantly outperforms all existing open-source and proprietary models on ShotBench, establishing new state-of-the-art performance. We open-source our models, data, and code to foster rapid progress in this crucial area of AI-driven cinematic understanding and generation.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 26 1

DreamCinema: Cinematic Transfer with Free Camera and 3D Character

We are living in a flourishing era of digital media, where everyone has the potential to become a personal filmmaker. Current research on cinematic transfer empowers filmmakers to reproduce and manipulate the visual elements (e.g., cinematography and character behaviors) from classic shots. However, characters in the reimagined films still rely on manual crafting, which involves significant technical complexity and high costs, making it unattainable for ordinary users. Furthermore, their estimated cinematography lacks smoothness due to inadequate capturing of inter-frame motion and modeling of physical trajectories. Fortunately, the remarkable success of 2D and 3D AIGC has opened up the possibility of efficiently generating characters tailored to users' needs, diversifying cinematography. In this paper, we propose DreamCinema, a novel cinematic transfer framework that pioneers generative AI into the film production paradigm, aiming at facilitating user-friendly film creation. Specifically, we first extract cinematic elements (i.e., human and camera pose) and optimize the camera trajectory. Then, we apply a character generator to efficiently create 3D high-quality characters with a human structure prior. Finally, we develop a structure-guided motion transfer strategy to incorporate generated characters into film creation and transfer it via 3D graphics engines smoothly. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for creating high-quality films with free camera and 3D characters.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 22, 2024 2

Cut2Next: Generating Next Shot via In-Context Tuning

Effective multi-shot generation demands purposeful, film-like transitions and strict cinematic continuity. Current methods, however, often prioritize basic visual consistency, neglecting crucial editing patterns (e.g., shot/reverse shot, cutaways) that drive narrative flow for compelling storytelling. This yields outputs that may be visually coherent but lack narrative sophistication and true cinematic integrity. To bridge this, we introduce Next Shot Generation (NSG): synthesizing a subsequent, high-quality shot that critically conforms to professional editing patterns while upholding rigorous cinematic continuity. Our framework, Cut2Next, leverages a Diffusion Transformer (DiT). It employs in-context tuning guided by a novel Hierarchical Multi-Prompting strategy. This strategy uses Relational Prompts to define overall context and inter-shot editing styles. Individual Prompts then specify per-shot content and cinematographic attributes. Together, these guide Cut2Next to generate cinematically appropriate next shots. Architectural innovations, Context-Aware Condition Injection (CACI) and Hierarchical Attention Mask (HAM), further integrate these diverse signals without introducing new parameters. We construct RawCuts (large-scale) and CuratedCuts (refined) datasets, both with hierarchical prompts, and introduce CutBench for evaluation. Experiments show Cut2Next excels in visual consistency and text fidelity. Crucially, user studies reveal a strong preference for Cut2Next, particularly for its adherence to intended editing patterns and overall cinematic continuity, validating its ability to generate high-quality, narratively expressive, and cinematically coherent subsequent shots.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 11 3

Free-viewpoint Human Animation with Pose-correlated Reference Selection

Diffusion-based human animation aims to animate a human character based on a source human image as well as driving signals such as a sequence of poses. Leveraging the generative capacity of diffusion model, existing approaches are able to generate high-fidelity poses, but struggle with significant viewpoint changes, especially in zoom-in/zoom-out scenarios where camera-character distance varies. This limits the applications such as cinematic shot type plan or camera control. We propose a pose-correlated reference selection diffusion network, supporting substantial viewpoint variations in human animation. Our key idea is to enable the network to utilize multiple reference images as input, since significant viewpoint changes often lead to missing appearance details on the human body. To eliminate the computational cost, we first introduce a novel pose correlation module to compute similarities between non-aligned target and source poses, and then propose an adaptive reference selection strategy, utilizing the attention map to identify key regions for animation generation. To train our model, we curated a large dataset from public TED talks featuring varied shots of the same character, helping the model learn synthesis for different perspectives. Our experimental results show that with the same number of reference images, our model performs favorably compared to the current SOTA methods under large viewpoint change. We further show that the adaptive reference selection is able to choose the most relevant reference regions to generate humans under free viewpoints.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 23, 2024

FairyGen: Storied Cartoon Video from a Single Child-Drawn Character

We propose FairyGen, an automatic system for generating story-driven cartoon videos from a single child's drawing, while faithfully preserving its unique artistic style. Unlike previous storytelling methods that primarily focus on character consistency and basic motion, FairyGen explicitly disentangles character modeling from stylized background generation and incorporates cinematic shot design to support expressive and coherent storytelling. Given a single character sketch, we first employ an MLLM to generate a structured storyboard with shot-level descriptions that specify environment settings, character actions, and camera perspectives. To ensure visual consistency, we introduce a style propagation adapter that captures the character's visual style and applies it to the background, faithfully retaining the character's full visual identity while synthesizing style-consistent scenes. A shot design module further enhances visual diversity and cinematic quality through frame cropping and multi-view synthesis based on the storyboard. To animate the story, we reconstruct a 3D proxy of the character to derive physically plausible motion sequences, which are then used to fine-tune an MMDiT-based image-to-video diffusion model. We further propose a two-stage motion customization adapter: the first stage learns appearance features from temporally unordered frames, disentangling identity from motion; the second stage models temporal dynamics using a timestep-shift strategy with frozen identity weights. Once trained, FairyGen directly renders diverse and coherent video scenes aligned with the storyboard. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system produces animations that are stylistically faithful, narratively structured natural motion, highlighting its potential for personalized and engaging story animation. The code will be available at https://github.com/GVCLab/FairyGen

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 26 1

CineTechBench: A Benchmark for Cinematographic Technique Understanding and Generation

Cinematography is a cornerstone of film production and appreciation, shaping mood, emotion, and narrative through visual elements such as camera movement, shot composition, and lighting. Despite recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and video generation models, the capacity of current models to grasp and reproduce cinematographic techniques remains largely uncharted, hindered by the scarcity of expert-annotated data. To bridge this gap, we present CineTechBench, a pioneering benchmark founded on precise, manual annotation by seasoned cinematography experts across key cinematography dimensions. Our benchmark covers seven essential aspects-shot scale, shot angle, composition, camera movement, lighting, color, and focal length-and includes over 600 annotated movie images and 120 movie clips with clear cinematographic techniques. For the understanding task, we design question answer pairs and annotated descriptions to assess MLLMs' ability to interpret and explain cinematographic techniques. For the generation task, we assess advanced video generation models on their capacity to reconstruct cinema-quality camera movements given conditions such as textual prompts or keyframes. We conduct a large-scale evaluation on 15+ MLLMs and 5+ video generation models. Our results offer insights into the limitations of current models and future directions for cinematography understanding and generation in automatically film production and appreciation. The code and benchmark can be accessed at https://github.com/PRIS-CV/CineTechBench.

  • 9 authors
·
May 21

Pulp Motion: Framing-aware multimodal camera and human motion generation

Treating human motion and camera trajectory generation separately overlooks a core principle of cinematography: the tight interplay between actor performance and camera work in the screen space. In this paper, we are the first to cast this task as a text-conditioned joint generation, aiming to maintain consistent on-screen framing while producing two heterogeneous, yet intrinsically linked, modalities: human motion and camera trajectories. We propose a simple, model-agnostic framework that enforces multimodal coherence via an auxiliary modality: the on-screen framing induced by projecting human joints onto the camera. This on-screen framing provides a natural and effective bridge between modalities, promoting consistency and leading to more precise joint distribution. We first design a joint autoencoder that learns a shared latent space, together with a lightweight linear transform from the human and camera latents to a framing latent. We then introduce auxiliary sampling, which exploits this linear transform to steer generation toward a coherent framing modality. To support this task, we also introduce the PulpMotion dataset, a human-motion and camera-trajectory dataset with rich captions, and high-quality human motions. Extensive experiments across DiT- and MAR-based architectures show the generality and effectiveness of our method in generating on-frame coherent human-camera motions, while also achieving gains on textual alignment for both modalities. Our qualitative results yield more cinematographically meaningful framings setting the new state of the art for this task. Code, models and data are available in our https://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/vista/projects/2025_pulpmotion_courant/{project page}.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 6

FilMaster: Bridging Cinematic Principles and Generative AI for Automated Film Generation

AI-driven content creation has shown potential in film production. However, existing film generation systems struggle to implement cinematic principles and thus fail to generate professional-quality films, particularly lacking diverse camera language and cinematic rhythm. This results in templated visuals and unengaging narratives. To address this, we introduce FilMaster, an end-to-end AI system that integrates real-world cinematic principles for professional-grade film generation, yielding editable, industry-standard outputs. FilMaster is built on two key principles: (1) learning cinematography from extensive real-world film data and (2) emulating professional, audience-centric post-production workflows. Inspired by these principles, FilMaster incorporates two stages: a Reference-Guided Generation Stage which transforms user input to video clips, and a Generative Post-Production Stage which transforms raw footage into audiovisual outputs by orchestrating visual and auditory elements for cinematic rhythm. Our generation stage highlights a Multi-shot Synergized RAG Camera Language Design module to guide the AI in generating professional camera language by retrieving reference clips from a vast corpus of 440,000 film clips. Our post-production stage emulates professional workflows by designing an Audience-Centric Cinematic Rhythm Control module, including Rough Cut and Fine Cut processes informed by simulated audience feedback, for effective integration of audiovisual elements to achieve engaging content. The system is empowered by generative AI models like (M)LLMs and video generation models. Furthermore, we introduce FilmEval, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating AI-generated films. Extensive experiments show FilMaster's superior performance in camera language design and cinematic rhythm control, advancing generative AI in professional filmmaking.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 23 1

Stable Cinemetrics : Structured Taxonomy and Evaluation for Professional Video Generation

Recent advances in video generation have enabled high-fidelity video synthesis from user provided prompts. However, existing models and benchmarks fail to capture the complexity and requirements of professional video generation. Towards that goal, we introduce Stable Cinemetrics, a structured evaluation framework that formalizes filmmaking controls into four disentangled, hierarchical taxonomies: Setup, Event, Lighting, and Camera. Together, these taxonomies define 76 fine-grained control nodes grounded in industry practices. Using these taxonomies, we construct a benchmark of prompts aligned with professional use cases and develop an automated pipeline for prompt categorization and question generation, enabling independent evaluation of each control dimension. We conduct a large-scale human study spanning 10+ models and 20K videos, annotated by a pool of 80+ film professionals. Our analysis, both coarse and fine-grained reveal that even the strongest current models exhibit significant gaps, particularly in Events and Camera-related controls. To enable scalable evaluation, we train an automatic evaluator, a vision-language model aligned with expert annotations that outperforms existing zero-shot baselines. SCINE is the first approach to situate professional video generation within the landscape of video generative models, introducing taxonomies centered around cinematic controls and supporting them with structured evaluation pipelines and detailed analyses to guide future research.

stabilityai Stability AI
·
Sep 30 2

Computational Long Exposure Mobile Photography

Long exposure photography produces stunning imagery, representing moving elements in a scene with motion-blur. It is generally employed in two modalities, producing either a foreground or a background blur effect. Foreground blur images are traditionally captured on a tripod-mounted camera and portray blurred moving foreground elements, such as silky water or light trails, over a perfectly sharp background landscape. Background blur images, also called panning photography, are captured while the camera is tracking a moving subject, to produce an image of a sharp subject over a background blurred by relative motion. Both techniques are notoriously challenging and require additional equipment and advanced skills. In this paper, we describe a computational burst photography system that operates in a hand-held smartphone camera app, and achieves these effects fully automatically, at the tap of the shutter button. Our approach first detects and segments the salient subject. We track the scene motion over multiple frames and align the images in order to preserve desired sharpness and to produce aesthetically pleasing motion streaks. We capture an under-exposed burst and select the subset of input frames that will produce blur trails of controlled length, regardless of scene or camera motion velocity. We predict inter-frame motion and synthesize motion-blur to fill the temporal gaps between the input frames. Finally, we composite the blurred image with the sharp regular exposure to protect the sharpness of faces or areas of the scene that are barely moving, and produce a final high resolution and high dynamic range (HDR) photograph. Our system democratizes a capability previously reserved to professionals, and makes this creative style accessible to most casual photographers. More information and supplementary material can be found on our project webpage: https://motion-mode.github.io/

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 2, 2023

GenDoP: Auto-regressive Camera Trajectory Generation as a Director of Photography

Camera trajectory design plays a crucial role in video production, serving as a fundamental tool for conveying directorial intent and enhancing visual storytelling. In cinematography, Directors of Photography meticulously craft camera movements to achieve expressive and intentional framing. However, existing methods for camera trajectory generation remain limited: Traditional approaches rely on geometric optimization or handcrafted procedural systems, while recent learning-based methods often inherit structural biases or lack textual alignment, constraining creative synthesis. In this work, we introduce an auto-regressive model inspired by the expertise of Directors of Photography to generate artistic and expressive camera trajectories. We first introduce DataDoP, a large-scale multi-modal dataset containing 29K real-world shots with free-moving camera trajectories, depth maps, and detailed captions in specific movements, interaction with the scene, and directorial intent. Thanks to the comprehensive and diverse database, we further train an auto-regressive, decoder-only Transformer for high-quality, context-aware camera movement generation based on text guidance and RGBD inputs, named GenDoP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared to existing methods, GenDoP offers better controllability, finer-grained trajectory adjustments, and higher motion stability. We believe our approach establishes a new standard for learning-based cinematography, paving the way for future advancements in camera control and filmmaking. Our project website: https://kszpxxzmc.github.io/GenDoP/.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 9 2

VideoGen-of-Thought: A Collaborative Framework for Multi-Shot Video Generation

Current video generation models excel at generating short clips but still struggle with creating multi-shot, movie-like videos. Existing models trained on large-scale data on the back of rich computational resources are unsurprisingly inadequate for maintaining a logical storyline and visual consistency across multiple shots of a cohesive script since they are often trained with a single-shot objective. To this end, we propose VideoGen-of-Thought (VGoT), a collaborative and training-free architecture designed specifically for multi-shot video generation. VGoT is designed with three goals in mind as follows. Multi-Shot Video Generation: We divide the video generation process into a structured, modular sequence, including (1) Script Generation, which translates a curt story into detailed prompts for each shot; (2) Keyframe Generation, responsible for creating visually consistent keyframes faithful to character portrayals; and (3) Shot-Level Video Generation, which transforms information from scripts and keyframes into shots; (4) Smoothing Mechanism that ensures a consistent multi-shot output. Reasonable Narrative Design: Inspired by cinematic scriptwriting, our prompt generation approach spans five key domains, ensuring logical consistency, character development, and narrative flow across the entire video. Cross-Shot Consistency: We ensure temporal and identity consistency by leveraging identity-preserving (IP) embeddings across shots, which are automatically created from the narrative. Additionally, we incorporate a cross-shot smoothing mechanism, which integrates a reset boundary that effectively combines latent features from adjacent shots, resulting in smooth transitions and maintaining visual coherence throughout the video. Our experiments demonstrate that VGoT surpasses existing video generation methods in producing high-quality, coherent, multi-shot videos.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024 5

ReCamMaster: Camera-Controlled Generative Rendering from A Single Video

Camera control has been actively studied in text or image conditioned video generation tasks. However, altering camera trajectories of a given video remains under-explored, despite its importance in the field of video creation. It is non-trivial due to the extra constraints of maintaining multiple-frame appearance and dynamic synchronization. To address this, we present ReCamMaster, a camera-controlled generative video re-rendering framework that reproduces the dynamic scene of an input video at novel camera trajectories. The core innovation lies in harnessing the generative capabilities of pre-trained text-to-video models through a simple yet powerful video conditioning mechanism -- its capability often overlooked in current research. To overcome the scarcity of qualified training data, we construct a comprehensive multi-camera synchronized video dataset using Unreal Engine 5, which is carefully curated to follow real-world filming characteristics, covering diverse scenes and camera movements. It helps the model generalize to in-the-wild videos. Lastly, we further improve the robustness to diverse inputs through a meticulously designed training strategy. Extensive experiments tell that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches and strong baselines. Our method also finds promising applications in video stabilization, super-resolution, and outpainting. Project page: https://jianhongbai.github.io/ReCamMaster/

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 14 5

PaintScene4D: Consistent 4D Scene Generation from Text Prompts

Recent advances in diffusion models have revolutionized 2D and 3D content creation, yet generating photorealistic dynamic 4D scenes remains a significant challenge. Existing dynamic 4D generation methods typically rely on distilling knowledge from pre-trained 3D generative models, often fine-tuned on synthetic object datasets. Consequently, the resulting scenes tend to be object-centric and lack photorealism. While text-to-video models can generate more realistic scenes with motion, they often struggle with spatial understanding and provide limited control over camera viewpoints during rendering. To address these limitations, we present PaintScene4D, a novel text-to-4D scene generation framework that departs from conventional multi-view generative models in favor of a streamlined architecture that harnesses video generative models trained on diverse real-world datasets. Our method first generates a reference video using a video generation model, and then employs a strategic camera array selection for rendering. We apply a progressive warping and inpainting technique to ensure both spatial and temporal consistency across multiple viewpoints. Finally, we optimize multi-view images using a dynamic renderer, enabling flexible camera control based on user preferences. Adopting a training-free architecture, our PaintScene4D efficiently produces realistic 4D scenes that can be viewed from arbitrary trajectories. The code will be made publicly available. Our project page is at https://paintscene4d.github.io/

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024

Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding

Computer vision has a great potential to help our daily lives by searching for lost keys, watering flowers or reminding us to take a pill. To succeed with such tasks, computer vision methods need to be trained from real and diverse examples of our daily dynamic scenes. While most of such scenes are not particularly exciting, they typically do not appear on YouTube, in movies or TV broadcasts. So how do we collect sufficiently many diverse but boring samples representing our lives? We propose a novel Hollywood in Homes approach to collect such data. Instead of shooting videos in the lab, we ensure diversity by distributing and crowdsourcing the whole process of video creation from script writing to video recording and annotation. Following this procedure we collect a new dataset, Charades, with hundreds of people recording videos in their own homes, acting out casual everyday activities. The dataset is composed of 9,848 annotated videos with an average length of 30 seconds, showing activities of 267 people from three continents. Each video is annotated by multiple free-text descriptions, action labels, action intervals and classes of interacted objects. In total, Charades provides 27,847 video descriptions, 66,500 temporally localized intervals for 157 action classes and 41,104 labels for 46 object classes. Using this rich data, we evaluate and provide baseline results for several tasks including action recognition and automatic description generation. We believe that the realism, diversity, and casual nature of this dataset will present unique challenges and new opportunities for computer vision community.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 6, 2016

ImplicitQA: Going beyond frames towards Implicit Video Reasoning

Video QA has made significant strides by leveraging multimodal learning to align visual and textual modalities. However, current benchmarks overwhelmingly focus on questions answerable through explicit visual content - actions, objects & events directly observable within individual frames or short clips. In contrast, creative and cinematic videos - such as movies, TV shows, and narrative-driven content - employ storytelling techniques that deliberately omit certain depictions, requiring viewers to infer motives, causality, and relationships across discontinuous frames. Humans naturally excel at such implicit reasoning, seamlessly integrating information across time and context to construct coherent narratives. Current VideoQA systems and benchmarks fail to capture this essential dimension of human-like understanding. To bridge this gap, we present ImplicitQA, a novel benchmark specifically designed to test models on implicit reasoning. It comprises 1K meticulously annotated QA pairs derived from 320+ high-quality creative video clips, systematically categorized into key reasoning dimensions: lateral and vertical spatial reasoning, depth and proximity, viewpoint and visibility, motion and trajectory, causal and motivational reasoning, social interactions, physical context, and inferred counting. These annotations are deliberately challenging, crafted by authors ensuring high-quality. Our extensive evaluations on leading VideoQA models reveals performance degradation, underscoring their reliance on surface-level visual cues and highlighting the difficulty of implicit reasoning. Performance variations across models further illustrate the complexity and diversity of the challenges presented by ImplicitQA. By releasing both the dataset and our data collection framework, we aim to stimulate further research and development in the community. https://huggingface.co/datasets/ucf-crcv/ImplicitQA.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 26

Towards Understanding Camera Motions in Any Video

We introduce CameraBench, a large-scale dataset and benchmark designed to assess and improve camera motion understanding. CameraBench consists of ~3,000 diverse internet videos, annotated by experts through a rigorous multi-stage quality control process. One of our contributions is a taxonomy of camera motion primitives, designed in collaboration with cinematographers. We find, for example, that some motions like "follow" (or tracking) require understanding scene content like moving subjects. We conduct a large-scale human study to quantify human annotation performance, revealing that domain expertise and tutorial-based training can significantly enhance accuracy. For example, a novice may confuse zoom-in (a change of intrinsics) with translating forward (a change of extrinsics), but can be trained to differentiate the two. Using CameraBench, we evaluate Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Video-Language Models (VLMs), finding that SfM models struggle to capture semantic primitives that depend on scene content, while VLMs struggle to capture geometric primitives that require precise estimation of trajectories. We then fine-tune a generative VLM on CameraBench to achieve the best of both worlds and showcase its applications, including motion-augmented captioning, video question answering, and video-text retrieval. We hope our taxonomy, benchmark, and tutorials will drive future efforts towards the ultimate goal of understanding camera motions in any video.

  • 15 authors
·
Apr 21 3

AnimeShooter: A Multi-Shot Animation Dataset for Reference-Guided Video Generation

Recent advances in AI-generated content (AIGC) have significantly accelerated animation production. To produce engaging animations, it is essential to generate coherent multi-shot video clips with narrative scripts and character references. However, existing public datasets primarily focus on real-world scenarios with global descriptions, and lack reference images for consistent character guidance. To bridge this gap, we present AnimeShooter, a reference-guided multi-shot animation dataset. AnimeShooter features comprehensive hierarchical annotations and strong visual consistency across shots through an automated pipeline. Story-level annotations provide an overview of the narrative, including the storyline, key scenes, and main character profiles with reference images, while shot-level annotations decompose the story into consecutive shots, each annotated with scene, characters, and both narrative and descriptive visual captions. Additionally, a dedicated subset, AnimeShooter-audio, offers synchronized audio tracks for each shot, along with audio descriptions and sound sources. To demonstrate the effectiveness of AnimeShooter and establish a baseline for the reference-guided multi-shot video generation task, we introduce AnimeShooterGen, which leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and video diffusion models. The reference image and previously generated shots are first processed by MLLM to produce representations aware of both reference and context, which are then used as the condition for the diffusion model to decode the subsequent shot. Experimental results show that the model trained on AnimeShooter achieves superior cross-shot visual consistency and adherence to reference visual guidance, which highlight the value of our dataset for coherent animated video generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 3 2

SEINE: Short-to-Long Video Diffusion Model for Generative Transition and Prediction

Recently video generation has achieved substantial progress with realistic results. Nevertheless, existing AI-generated videos are usually very short clips ("shot-level") depicting a single scene. To deliver a coherent long video ("story-level"), it is desirable to have creative transition and prediction effects across different clips. This paper presents a short-to-long video diffusion model, SEINE, that focuses on generative transition and prediction. The goal is to generate high-quality long videos with smooth and creative transitions between scenes and varying lengths of shot-level videos. Specifically, we propose a random-mask video diffusion model to automatically generate transitions based on textual descriptions. By providing the images of different scenes as inputs, combined with text-based control, our model generates transition videos that ensure coherence and visual quality. Furthermore, the model can be readily extended to various tasks such as image-to-video animation and autoregressive video prediction. To conduct a comprehensive evaluation of this new generative task, we propose three assessing criteria for smooth and creative transition: temporal consistency, semantic similarity, and video-text semantic alignment. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach over existing methods for generative transition and prediction, enabling the creation of story-level long videos. Project page: https://vchitect.github.io/SEINE-project/ .

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 31, 2023 1

Long-Term Photometric Consistent Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models

Novel view synthesis from a single input image is a challenging task, where the goal is to generate a new view of a scene from a desired camera pose that may be separated by a large motion. The highly uncertain nature of this synthesis task due to unobserved elements within the scene (i.e. occlusion) and outside the field-of-view makes the use of generative models appealing to capture the variety of possible outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model capable of producing a sequence of photorealistic images consistent with a specified camera trajectory, and a single starting image. Our approach is centred on an autoregressive conditional diffusion-based model capable of interpolating visible scene elements, and extrapolating unobserved regions in a view, in a geometrically consistent manner. Conditioning is limited to an image capturing a single camera view and the (relative) pose of the new camera view. To measure the consistency over a sequence of generated views, we introduce a new metric, the thresholded symmetric epipolar distance (TSED), to measure the number of consistent frame pairs in a sequence. While previous methods have been shown to produce high quality images and consistent semantics across pairs of views, we show empirically with our metric that they are often inconsistent with the desired camera poses. In contrast, we demonstrate that our method produces both photorealistic and view-consistent imagery.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 20, 2023

VFX Creator: Animated Visual Effect Generation with Controllable Diffusion Transformer

Crafting magic and illusions is one of the most thrilling aspects of filmmaking, with visual effects (VFX) serving as the powerhouse behind unforgettable cinematic experiences. While recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have driven progress in generic image and video synthesis, the domain of controllable VFX generation remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm for animated VFX generation as image animation, where dynamic effects are generated from user-friendly textual descriptions and static reference images. Our work makes two primary contributions: (i) Open-VFX, the first high-quality VFX video dataset spanning 15 diverse effect categories, annotated with textual descriptions, instance segmentation masks for spatial conditioning, and start-end timestamps for temporal control. (ii) VFX Creator, a simple yet effective controllable VFX generation framework based on a Video Diffusion Transformer. The model incorporates a spatial and temporal controllable LoRA adapter, requiring minimal training videos. Specifically, a plug-and-play mask control module enables instance-level spatial manipulation, while tokenized start-end motion timestamps embedded in the diffusion process, alongside the text encoder, allow precise temporal control over effect timing and pace. Extensive experiments on the Open-VFX test set demonstrate the superiority of the proposed system in generating realistic and dynamic effects, achieving state-of-the-art performance and generalization ability in both spatial and temporal controllability. Furthermore, we introduce a specialized metric to evaluate the precision of temporal control. By bridging traditional VFX techniques with generative approaches, VFX Creator unlocks new possibilities for efficient and high-quality video effect generation, making advanced VFX accessible to a broader audience.

AnimateScene: Camera-controllable Animation in Any Scene

3D scene reconstruction and 4D human animation have seen rapid progress and broad adoption in recent years. However, seamlessly integrating reconstructed scenes with 4D human animation to produce visually engaging results remains challenging. One key difficulty lies in placing the human at the correct location and scale within the scene while avoiding unrealistic interpenetration. Another challenge is that the human and the background may exhibit different lighting and style, leading to unrealistic composites. In addition, appealing character motion videos are often accompanied by camera movements, which means that the viewpoints need to be reconstructed along a specified trajectory. We present AnimateScene, which addresses the above issues in a unified framework. First, we design an accurate placement module that automatically determines a plausible 3D position for the human and prevents any interpenetration within the scene during motion. Second, we propose a training-free style alignment method that adapts the 4D human representation to match the background's lighting and style, achieving coherent visual integration. Finally, we design a joint post-reconstruction method for both the 4D human and the 3D scene that allows camera trajectories to be inserted, enabling the final rendered video to feature visually appealing camera movements. Extensive experiments show that AnimateScene generates dynamic scene videos with high geometric detail and spatiotemporal coherence across various camera and action combinations.

  • 12 authors
·
Aug 7

HumanVid: Demystifying Training Data for Camera-controllable Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating videos from a character photo, allowing user control and unlocking potential for video and movie production. While recent approaches yield impressive results using high-quality training data, the inaccessibility of these datasets hampers fair and transparent benchmarking. Moreover, these approaches prioritize 2D human motion and overlook the significance of camera motions in videos, leading to limited control and unstable video generation.To demystify the training data, we present HumanVid, the first large-scale high-quality dataset tailored for human image animation, which combines crafted real-world and synthetic data. For the real-world data, we compile a vast collection of copyright-free real-world videos from the internet. Through a carefully designed rule-based filtering strategy, we ensure the inclusion of high-quality videos, resulting in a collection of 20K human-centric videos in 1080P resolution. Human and camera motion annotation is accomplished using a 2D pose estimator and a SLAM-based method. For the synthetic data, we gather 2,300 copyright-free 3D avatar assets to augment existing available 3D assets. Notably, we introduce a rule-based camera trajectory generation method, enabling the synthetic pipeline to incorporate diverse and precise camera motion annotation, which can rarely be found in real-world data. To verify the effectiveness of HumanVid, we establish a baseline model named CamAnimate, short for Camera-controllable Human Animation, that considers both human and camera motions as conditions. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that such simple baseline training on our HumanVid achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling both human pose and camera motions, setting a new benchmark. Code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhenzhiwang/HumanVid/.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 24, 2024 3

Seeing Voices: Generating A-Roll Video from Audio with Mirage

From professional filmmaking to user-generated content, creators and consumers have long recognized that the power of video depends on the harmonious integration of what we hear (the video's audio track) with what we see (the video's image sequence). Current approaches to video generation either ignore sound to focus on general-purpose but silent image sequence generation or address both visual and audio elements but focus on restricted application domains such as re-dubbing. We introduce Mirage, an audio-to-video foundation model that excels at generating realistic, expressive output imagery from scratch given an audio input. When integrated with existing methods for speech synthesis (text-to-speech, or TTS), Mirage results in compelling multimodal video. When trained on audio-video footage of people talking (A-roll) and conditioned on audio containing speech, Mirage generates video of people delivering a believable interpretation of the performance implicit in input audio. Our central technical contribution is a unified method for training self-attention-based audio-to-video generation models, either from scratch or given existing weights. This methodology allows Mirage to retain generality as an approach to audio-to-video generation while producing outputs of superior subjective quality to methods that incorporate audio-specific architectures or loss components specific to people, speech, or details of how images or audio are captured. We encourage readers to watch and listen to the results of Mirage for themselves (see paper and comments for links).

DropletVideo: A Dataset and Approach to Explore Integral Spatio-Temporal Consistent Video Generation

Spatio-temporal consistency is a critical research topic in video generation. A qualified generated video segment must ensure plot plausibility and coherence while maintaining visual consistency of objects and scenes across varying viewpoints. Prior research, especially in open-source projects, primarily focuses on either temporal or spatial consistency, or their basic combination, such as appending a description of a camera movement after a prompt without constraining the outcomes of this movement. However, camera movement may introduce new objects to the scene or eliminate existing ones, thereby overlaying and affecting the preceding narrative. Especially in videos with numerous camera movements, the interplay between multiple plots becomes increasingly complex. This paper introduces and examines integral spatio-temporal consistency, considering the synergy between plot progression and camera techniques, and the long-term impact of prior content on subsequent generation. Our research encompasses dataset construction through to the development of the model. Initially, we constructed a DropletVideo-10M dataset, which comprises 10 million videos featuring dynamic camera motion and object actions. Each video is annotated with an average caption of 206 words, detailing various camera movements and plot developments. Following this, we developed and trained the DropletVideo model, which excels in preserving spatio-temporal coherence during video generation. The DropletVideo dataset and model are accessible at https://dropletx.github.io.

Hallo2: Long-Duration and High-Resolution Audio-Driven Portrait Image Animation

Recent advances in latent diffusion-based generative models for portrait image animation, such as Hallo, have achieved impressive results in short-duration video synthesis. In this paper, we present updates to Hallo, introducing several design enhancements to extend its capabilities. First, we extend the method to produce long-duration videos. To address substantial challenges such as appearance drift and temporal artifacts, we investigate augmentation strategies within the image space of conditional motion frames. Specifically, we introduce a patch-drop technique augmented with Gaussian noise to enhance visual consistency and temporal coherence over long duration. Second, we achieve 4K resolution portrait video generation. To accomplish this, we implement vector quantization of latent codes and apply temporal alignment techniques to maintain coherence across the temporal dimension. By integrating a high-quality decoder, we realize visual synthesis at 4K resolution. Third, we incorporate adjustable semantic textual labels for portrait expressions as conditional inputs. This extends beyond traditional audio cues to improve controllability and increase the diversity of the generated content. To the best of our knowledge, Hallo2, proposed in this paper, is the first method to achieve 4K resolution and generate hour-long, audio-driven portrait image animations enhanced with textual prompts. We have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate our method on publicly available datasets, including HDTF, CelebV, and our introduced "Wild" dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in long-duration portrait video animation, successfully generating rich and controllable content at 4K resolution for duration extending up to tens of minutes. Project page https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/hallo2

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 10, 2024

SkyReels-V2: Infinite-length Film Generative Model

Recent advances in video generation have been driven by diffusion models and autoregressive frameworks, yet critical challenges persist in harmonizing prompt adherence, visual quality, motion dynamics, and duration: compromises in motion dynamics to enhance temporal visual quality, constrained video duration (5-10 seconds) to prioritize resolution, and inadequate shot-aware generation stemming from general-purpose MLLMs' inability to interpret cinematic grammar, such as shot composition, actor expressions, and camera motions. These intertwined limitations hinder realistic long-form synthesis and professional film-style generation. To address these limitations, we propose SkyReels-V2, an Infinite-length Film Generative Model, that synergizes Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM), Multi-stage Pretraining, Reinforcement Learning, and Diffusion Forcing Framework. Firstly, we design a comprehensive structural representation of video that combines the general descriptions by the Multi-modal LLM and the detailed shot language by sub-expert models. Aided with human annotation, we then train a unified Video Captioner, named SkyCaptioner-V1, to efficiently label the video data. Secondly, we establish progressive-resolution pretraining for the fundamental video generation, followed by a four-stage post-training enhancement: Initial concept-balanced Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) improves baseline quality; Motion-specific Reinforcement Learning (RL) training with human-annotated and synthetic distortion data addresses dynamic artifacts; Our diffusion forcing framework with non-decreasing noise schedules enables long-video synthesis in an efficient search space; Final high-quality SFT refines visual fidelity. All the code and models are available at https://github.com/SkyworkAI/SkyReels-V2.

  • 25 authors
·
Apr 17

MoCha: Towards Movie-Grade Talking Character Synthesis

Recent advancements in video generation have achieved impressive motion realism, yet they often overlook character-driven storytelling, a crucial task for automated film, animation generation. We introduce Talking Characters, a more realistic task to generate talking character animations directly from speech and text. Unlike talking head, Talking Characters aims at generating the full portrait of one or more characters beyond the facial region. In this paper, we propose MoCha, the first of its kind to generate talking characters. To ensure precise synchronization between video and speech, we propose a speech-video window attention mechanism that effectively aligns speech and video tokens. To address the scarcity of large-scale speech-labeled video datasets, we introduce a joint training strategy that leverages both speech-labeled and text-labeled video data, significantly improving generalization across diverse character actions. We also design structured prompt templates with character tags, enabling, for the first time, multi-character conversation with turn-based dialogue-allowing AI-generated characters to engage in context-aware conversations with cinematic coherence. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, including human preference studies and benchmark comparisons, demonstrate that MoCha sets a new standard for AI-generated cinematic storytelling, achieving superior realism, expressiveness, controllability and generalization.

  • 13 authors
·
Mar 30 19

CI-VID: A Coherent Interleaved Text-Video Dataset

Text-to-video (T2V) generation has recently attracted considerable attention, resulting in the development of numerous high-quality datasets that have propelled progress in this area. However, existing public datasets are primarily composed of isolated text-video (T-V) pairs and thus fail to support the modeling of coherent multi-clip video sequences. To address this limitation, we introduce CI-VID, a dataset that moves beyond isolated text-to-video (T2V) generation toward text-and-video-to-video (TV2V) generation, enabling models to produce coherent, multi-scene video sequences. CI-VID contains over 340,000 samples, each featuring a coherent sequence of video clips with text captions that capture both the individual content of each clip and the transitions between them, enabling visually and textually grounded generation. To further validate the effectiveness of CI-VID, we design a comprehensive, multi-dimensional benchmark incorporating human evaluation, VLM-based assessment, and similarity-based metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained on CI-VID exhibit significant improvements in both accuracy and content consistency when generating video sequences. This facilitates the creation of story-driven content with smooth visual transitions and strong temporal coherence, underscoring the quality and practical utility of the CI-VID dataset We release the CI-VID dataset and the accompanying code for data construction and evaluation at: https://github.com/ymju-BAAI/CI-VID

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 2

Eliminating Warping Shakes for Unsupervised Online Video Stitching

In this paper, we retarget video stitching to an emerging issue, named warping shake, when extending image stitching to video stitching. It unveils the temporal instability of warped content in non-overlapping regions, despite image stitching having endeavored to preserve the natural structures. Therefore, in most cases, even if the input videos to be stitched are stable, the stitched video will inevitably cause undesired warping shakes and affect the visual experience. To eliminate the shakes, we propose StabStitch to simultaneously realize video stitching and video stabilization in a unified unsupervised learning framework. Starting from the camera paths in video stabilization, we first derive the expression of stitching trajectories in video stitching by elaborately integrating spatial and temporal warps. Then a warp smoothing model is presented to optimize them with a comprehensive consideration regarding content alignment, trajectory smoothness, spatial consistency, and online collaboration. To establish an evaluation benchmark and train the learning framework, we build a video stitching dataset with a rich diversity in camera motions and scenes. Compared with existing stitching solutions, StabStitch exhibits significant superiority in scene robustness and inference speed in addition to stitching and stabilization performance, contributing to a robust and real-time online video stitching system. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/nie-lang/StabStitch.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10, 2024

MagicScroll: Nontypical Aspect-Ratio Image Generation for Visual Storytelling via Multi-Layered Semantic-Aware Denoising

Visual storytelling often uses nontypical aspect-ratio images like scroll paintings, comic strips, and panoramas to create an expressive and compelling narrative. While generative AI has achieved great success and shown the potential to reshape the creative industry, it remains a challenge to generate coherent and engaging content with arbitrary size and controllable style, concept, and layout, all of which are essential for visual storytelling. To overcome the shortcomings of previous methods including repetitive content, style inconsistency, and lack of controllability, we propose MagicScroll, a multi-layered, progressive diffusion-based image generation framework with a novel semantic-aware denoising process. The model enables fine-grained control over the generated image on object, scene, and background levels with text, image, and layout conditions. We also establish the first benchmark for nontypical aspect-ratio image generation for visual storytelling including mediums like paintings, comics, and cinematic panoramas, with customized metrics for systematic evaluation. Through comparative and ablation studies, MagicScroll showcases promising results in aligning with the narrative text, improving visual coherence, and engaging the audience. We plan to release the code and benchmark in the hope of a better collaboration between AI researchers and creative practitioners involving visual storytelling.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 17, 2023 1

Lumen: Consistent Video Relighting and Harmonious Background Replacement with Video Generative Models

Video relighting is a challenging yet valuable task, aiming to replace the background in videos while correspondingly adjusting the lighting in the foreground with harmonious blending. During translation, it is essential to preserve the original properties of the foreground, e.g., albedo, and propagate consistent relighting among temporal frames. In this paper, we propose Lumen, an end-to-end video relighting framework developed on large-scale video generative models, receiving flexible textual description for instructing the control of lighting and background. Considering the scarcity of high-qualified paired videos with the same foreground in various lighting conditions, we construct a large-scale dataset with a mixture of realistic and synthetic videos. For the synthetic domain, benefiting from the abundant 3D assets in the community, we leverage advanced 3D rendering engine to curate video pairs in diverse environments. For the realistic domain, we adapt a HDR-based lighting simulation to complement the lack of paired in-the-wild videos. Powered by the aforementioned dataset, we design a joint training curriculum to effectively unleash the strengths of each domain, i.e., the physical consistency in synthetic videos, and the generalized domain distribution in realistic videos. To implement this, we inject a domain-aware adapter into the model to decouple the learning of relighting and domain appearance distribution. We construct a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate Lumen together with existing methods, from the perspectives of foreground preservation and video consistency assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that Lumen effectively edit the input into cinematic relighted videos with consistent lighting and strict foreground preservation. Our project page: https://lumen-relight.github.io/

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 18 3

Omni-Effects: Unified and Spatially-Controllable Visual Effects Generation

Visual effects (VFX) are essential visual enhancements fundamental to modern cinematic production. Although video generation models offer cost-efficient solutions for VFX production, current methods are constrained by per-effect LoRA training, which limits generation to single effects. This fundamental limitation impedes applications that require spatially controllable composite effects, i.e., the concurrent generation of multiple effects at designated locations. However, integrating diverse effects into a unified framework faces major challenges: interference from effect variations and spatial uncontrollability during multi-VFX joint training. To tackle these challenges, we propose Omni-Effects, a first unified framework capable of generating prompt-guided effects and spatially controllable composite effects. The core of our framework comprises two key innovations: (1) LoRA-based Mixture of Experts (LoRA-MoE), which employs a group of expert LoRAs, integrating diverse effects within a unified model while effectively mitigating cross-task interference. (2) Spatial-Aware Prompt (SAP) incorporates spatial mask information into the text token, enabling precise spatial control. Furthermore, we introduce an Independent-Information Flow (IIF) module integrated within the SAP, isolating the control signals corresponding to individual effects to prevent any unwanted blending. To facilitate this research, we construct a comprehensive VFX dataset Omni-VFX via a novel data collection pipeline combining image editing and First-Last Frame-to-Video (FLF2V) synthesis, and introduce a dedicated VFX evaluation framework for validating model performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Omni-Effects achieves precise spatial control and diverse effect generation, enabling users to specify both the category and location of desired effects.

CoDeF: Content Deformation Fields for Temporally Consistent Video Processing

We present the content deformation field CoDeF as a new type of video representation, which consists of a canonical content field aggregating the static contents in the entire video and a temporal deformation field recording the transformations from the canonical image (i.e., rendered from the canonical content field) to each individual frame along the time axis.Given a target video, these two fields are jointly optimized to reconstruct it through a carefully tailored rendering pipeline.We advisedly introduce some regularizations into the optimization process, urging the canonical content field to inherit semantics (e.g., the object shape) from the video.With such a design, CoDeF naturally supports lifting image algorithms for video processing, in the sense that one can apply an image algorithm to the canonical image and effortlessly propagate the outcomes to the entire video with the aid of the temporal deformation field.We experimentally show that CoDeF is able to lift image-to-image translation to video-to-video translation and lift keypoint detection to keypoint tracking without any training.More importantly, thanks to our lifting strategy that deploys the algorithms on only one image, we achieve superior cross-frame consistency in processed videos compared to existing video-to-video translation approaches, and even manage to track non-rigid objects like water and smog.Project page can be found at https://qiuyu96.github.io/CoDeF/.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 15, 2023 1

Droplet3D: Commonsense Priors from Videos Facilitate 3D Generation

Scaling laws have validated the success and promise of large-data-trained models in creative generation across text, image, and video domains. However, this paradigm faces data scarcity in the 3D domain, as there is far less of it available on the internet compared to the aforementioned modalities. Fortunately, there exist adequate videos that inherently contain commonsense priors, offering an alternative supervisory signal to mitigate the generalization bottleneck caused by limited native 3D data. On the one hand, videos capturing multiple views of an object or scene provide a spatial consistency prior for 3D generation. On the other hand, the rich semantic information contained within the videos enables the generated content to be more faithful to the text prompts and semantically plausible. This paper explores how to apply the video modality in 3D asset generation, spanning datasets to models. We introduce Droplet3D-4M, the first large-scale video dataset with multi-view level annotations, and train Droplet3D, a generative model supporting both image and dense text input. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating its ability to produce spatially consistent and semantically plausible content. Moreover, in contrast to the prevailing 3D solutions, our approach exhibits the potential for extension to scene-level applications. This indicates that the commonsense priors from the videos significantly facilitate 3D creation. We have open-sourced all resources including the dataset, code, technical framework, and model weights: https://dropletx.github.io/.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 28 2

CINEMA: Coherent Multi-Subject Video Generation via MLLM-Based Guidance

Video generation has witnessed remarkable progress with the advent of deep generative models, particularly diffusion models. While existing methods excel in generating high-quality videos from text prompts or single images, personalized multi-subject video generation remains a largely unexplored challenge. This task involves synthesizing videos that incorporate multiple distinct subjects, each defined by separate reference images, while ensuring temporal and spatial consistency. Current approaches primarily rely on mapping subject images to keywords in text prompts, which introduces ambiguity and limits their ability to model subject relationships effectively. In this paper, we propose CINEMA, a novel framework for coherent multi-subject video generation by leveraging Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Our approach eliminates the need for explicit correspondences between subject images and text entities, mitigating ambiguity and reducing annotation effort. By leveraging MLLM to interpret subject relationships, our method facilitates scalability, enabling the use of large and diverse datasets for training. Furthermore, our framework can be conditioned on varying numbers of subjects, offering greater flexibility in personalized content creation. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves subject consistency, and overall video coherence, paving the way for advanced applications in storytelling, interactive media, and personalized video generation.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 13 4

VideoRFSplat: Direct Scene-Level Text-to-3D Gaussian Splatting Generation with Flexible Pose and Multi-View Joint Modeling

We propose VideoRFSplat, a direct text-to-3D model leveraging a video generation model to generate realistic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for unbounded real-world scenes. To generate diverse camera poses and unbounded spatial extent of real-world scenes, while ensuring generalization to arbitrary text prompts, previous methods fine-tune 2D generative models to jointly model camera poses and multi-view images. However, these methods suffer from instability when extending 2D generative models to joint modeling due to the modality gap, which necessitates additional models to stabilize training and inference. In this work, we propose an architecture and a sampling strategy to jointly model multi-view images and camera poses when fine-tuning a video generation model. Our core idea is a dual-stream architecture that attaches a dedicated pose generation model alongside a pre-trained video generation model via communication blocks, generating multi-view images and camera poses through separate streams. This design reduces interference between the pose and image modalities. Additionally, we propose an asynchronous sampling strategy that denoises camera poses faster than multi-view images, allowing rapidly denoised poses to condition multi-view generation, reducing mutual ambiguity and enhancing cross-modal consistency. Trained on multiple large-scale real-world datasets (RealEstate10K, MVImgNet, DL3DV-10K, ACID), VideoRFSplat outperforms existing text-to-3D direct generation methods that heavily depend on post-hoc refinement via score distillation sampling, achieving superior results without such refinement.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 20 2

Anim-Director: A Large Multimodal Model Powered Agent for Controllable Animation Video Generation

Traditional animation generation methods depend on training generative models with human-labelled data, entailing a sophisticated multi-stage pipeline that demands substantial human effort and incurs high training costs. Due to limited prompting plans, these methods typically produce brief, information-poor, and context-incoherent animations. To overcome these limitations and automate the animation process, we pioneer the introduction of large multimodal models (LMMs) as the core processor to build an autonomous animation-making agent, named Anim-Director. This agent mainly harnesses the advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities of LMMs and generative AI tools to create animated videos from concise narratives or simple instructions. Specifically, it operates in three main stages: Firstly, the Anim-Director generates a coherent storyline from user inputs, followed by a detailed director's script that encompasses settings of character profiles and interior/exterior descriptions, and context-coherent scene descriptions that include appearing characters, interiors or exteriors, and scene events. Secondly, we employ LMMs with the image generation tool to produce visual images of settings and scenes. These images are designed to maintain visual consistency across different scenes using a visual-language prompting method that combines scene descriptions and images of the appearing character and setting. Thirdly, scene images serve as the foundation for producing animated videos, with LMMs generating prompts to guide this process. The whole process is notably autonomous without manual intervention, as the LMMs interact seamlessly with generative tools to generate prompts, evaluate visual quality, and select the best one to optimize the final output.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 19, 2024 2

Anything in Any Scene: Photorealistic Video Object Insertion

Realistic video simulation has shown significant potential across diverse applications, from virtual reality to film production. This is particularly true for scenarios where capturing videos in real-world settings is either impractical or expensive. Existing approaches in video simulation often fail to accurately model the lighting environment, represent the object geometry, or achieve high levels of photorealism. In this paper, we propose Anything in Any Scene, a novel and generic framework for realistic video simulation that seamlessly inserts any object into an existing dynamic video with a strong emphasis on physical realism. Our proposed general framework encompasses three key processes: 1) integrating a realistic object into a given scene video with proper placement to ensure geometric realism; 2) estimating the sky and environmental lighting distribution and simulating realistic shadows to enhance the light realism; 3) employing a style transfer network that refines the final video output to maximize photorealism. We experimentally demonstrate that Anything in Any Scene framework produces simulated videos of great geometric realism, lighting realism, and photorealism. By significantly mitigating the challenges associated with video data generation, our framework offers an efficient and cost-effective solution for acquiring high-quality videos. Furthermore, its applications extend well beyond video data augmentation, showing promising potential in virtual reality, video editing, and various other video-centric applications. Please check our project website https://anythinginanyscene.github.io for access to our project code and more high-resolution video results.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 30, 2024 1

Vript: A Video Is Worth Thousands of Words

Advancements in multimodal learning, particularly in video understanding and generation, require high-quality video-text datasets for improved model performance. Vript addresses this issue with a meticulously annotated corpus of 12K high-resolution videos, offering detailed, dense, and script-like captions for over 420K clips. Each clip has a caption of ~145 words, which is over 10x longer than most video-text datasets. Unlike captions only documenting static content in previous datasets, we enhance video captioning to video scripting by documenting not just the content, but also the camera operations, which include the shot types (medium shot, close-up, etc) and camera movements (panning, tilting, etc). By utilizing the Vript, we explore three training paradigms of aligning more text with the video modality rather than clip-caption pairs. This results in Vriptor, a top-performing video captioning model among open-source models, comparable to GPT-4V in performance. Vriptor is also a powerful model capable of end-to-end generation of dense and detailed captions for long videos. Moreover, we introduce Vript-Hard, a benchmark consisting of three video understanding tasks that are more challenging than existing benchmarks: Vript-HAL is the first benchmark evaluating action and object hallucinations in video LLMs, Vript-RR combines reasoning with retrieval resolving question ambiguity in long-video QAs, and Vript-ERO is a new task to evaluate the temporal understanding of events in long videos rather than actions in short videos in previous works. All code, models, and datasets are available in https://github.com/mutonix/Vript.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024

KFFocus: Highlighting Keyframes for Enhanced Video Understanding

Recently, with the emergence of large language models, multimodal LLMs have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in image and video modalities. Despite advancements in video comprehension, the substantial computational demands of long video sequences lead current video LLMs (Vid-LLMs) to employ compression strategies at both the inter-frame level (e.g., uniform sampling of video frames) and intra-frame level (e.g., condensing all visual tokens of each frame into a limited number). However, this approach often neglects the uneven temporal distribution of critical information across frames, risking the omission of keyframes that contain essential temporal and semantic details. To tackle these challenges, we propose KFFocus, a method designed to efficiently compress video tokens and emphasize the informative context present within video frames. We substitute uniform sampling with a refined approach inspired by classic video compression principles to identify and capture keyframes based on their temporal redundancy. By assigning varying condensation ratios to frames based on their contextual relevance, KFFocus efficiently reduces token redundancy while preserving informative content details. Additionally, we introduce a spatiotemporal modeling module that encodes both the temporal relationships between video frames and the spatial structure within each frame, thus providing Vid-LLMs with a nuanced understanding of spatial-temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on widely recognized video understanding benchmarks, especially long video scenarios, demonstrate that KFFocus significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving substantial computational efficiency and enhanced accuracy.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 12

AniMaker: Automated Multi-Agent Animated Storytelling with MCTS-Driven Clip Generation

Despite rapid advancements in video generation models, generating coherent storytelling videos that span multiple scenes and characters remains challenging. Current methods often rigidly convert pre-generated keyframes into fixed-length clips, resulting in disjointed narratives and pacing issues. Furthermore, the inherent instability of video generation models means that even a single low-quality clip can significantly degrade the entire output animation's logical coherence and visual continuity. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce AniMaker, a multi-agent framework enabling efficient multi-candidate clip generation and storytelling-aware clip selection, thus creating globally consistent and story-coherent animation solely from text input. The framework is structured around specialized agents, including the Director Agent for storyboard generation, the Photography Agent for video clip generation, the Reviewer Agent for evaluation, and the Post-Production Agent for editing and voiceover. Central to AniMaker's approach are two key technical components: MCTS-Gen in Photography Agent, an efficient Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-inspired strategy that intelligently navigates the candidate space to generate high-potential clips while optimizing resource usage; and AniEval in Reviewer Agent, the first framework specifically designed for multi-shot animation evaluation, which assesses critical aspects such as story-level consistency, action completion, and animation-specific features by considering each clip in the context of its preceding and succeeding clips. Experiments demonstrate that AniMaker achieves superior quality as measured by popular metrics including VBench and our proposed AniEval framework, while significantly improving the efficiency of multi-candidate generation, pushing AI-generated storytelling animation closer to production standards.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 12 5

Generative Inbetweening through Frame-wise Conditions-Driven Video Generation

Generative inbetweening aims to generate intermediate frame sequences by utilizing two key frames as input. Although remarkable progress has been made in video generation models, generative inbetweening still faces challenges in maintaining temporal stability due to the ambiguous interpolation path between two key frames. This issue becomes particularly severe when there is a large motion gap between input frames. In this paper, we propose a straightforward yet highly effective Frame-wise Conditions-driven Video Generation (FCVG) method that significantly enhances the temporal stability of interpolated video frames. Specifically, our FCVG provides an explicit condition for each frame, making it much easier to identify the interpolation path between two input frames and thus ensuring temporally stable production of visually plausible video frames. To achieve this, we suggest extracting matched lines from two input frames that can then be easily interpolated frame by frame, serving as frame-wise conditions seamlessly integrated into existing video generation models. In extensive evaluations covering diverse scenarios such as natural landscapes, complex human poses, camera movements and animations, existing methods often exhibit incoherent transitions across frames. In contrast, our FCVG demonstrates the capability to generate temporally stable videos using both linear and non-linear interpolation curves. Our project page and code are available at https://fcvg-inbetween.github.io/.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024

NarrLV: Towards a Comprehensive Narrative-Centric Evaluation for Long Video Generation Models

With the rapid development of foundation video generation technologies, long video generation models have exhibited promising research potential thanks to expanded content creation space. Recent studies reveal that the goal of long video generation tasks is not only to extend video duration but also to accurately express richer narrative content within longer videos. However, due to the lack of evaluation benchmarks specifically designed for long video generation models, the current assessment of these models primarily relies on benchmarks with simple narrative prompts (e.g., VBench). To the best of our knowledge, our proposed NarrLV is the first benchmark to comprehensively evaluate the Narrative expression capabilities of Long Video generation models. Inspired by film narrative theory, (i) we first introduce the basic narrative unit maintaining continuous visual presentation in videos as Temporal Narrative Atom (TNA), and use its count to quantitatively measure narrative richness. Guided by three key film narrative elements influencing TNA changes, we construct an automatic prompt generation pipeline capable of producing evaluation prompts with a flexibly expandable number of TNAs. (ii) Then, based on the three progressive levels of narrative content expression, we design an effective evaluation metric using the MLLM-based question generation and answering framework. (iii) Finally, we conduct extensive evaluations on existing long video generation models and the foundation generation models. Experimental results demonstrate that our metric aligns closely with human judgments. The derived evaluation outcomes reveal the detailed capability boundaries of current video generation models in narrative content expression.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 15

HoloTime: Taming Video Diffusion Models for Panoramic 4D Scene Generation

The rapid advancement of diffusion models holds the promise of revolutionizing the application of VR and AR technologies, which typically require scene-level 4D assets for user experience. Nonetheless, existing diffusion models predominantly concentrate on modeling static 3D scenes or object-level dynamics, constraining their capacity to provide truly immersive experiences. To address this issue, we propose HoloTime, a framework that integrates video diffusion models to generate panoramic videos from a single prompt or reference image, along with a 360-degree 4D scene reconstruction method that seamlessly transforms the generated panoramic video into 4D assets, enabling a fully immersive 4D experience for users. Specifically, to tame video diffusion models for generating high-fidelity panoramic videos, we introduce the 360World dataset, the first comprehensive collection of panoramic videos suitable for downstream 4D scene reconstruction tasks. With this curated dataset, we propose Panoramic Animator, a two-stage image-to-video diffusion model that can convert panoramic images into high-quality panoramic videos. Following this, we present Panoramic Space-Time Reconstruction, which leverages a space-time depth estimation method to transform the generated panoramic videos into 4D point clouds, enabling the optimization of a holistic 4D Gaussian Splatting representation to reconstruct spatially and temporally consistent 4D scenes. To validate the efficacy of our method, we conducted a comparative analysis with existing approaches, revealing its superiority in both panoramic video generation and 4D scene reconstruction. This demonstrates our method's capability to create more engaging and realistic immersive environments, thereby enhancing user experiences in VR and AR applications.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 30 1

Action Reimagined: Text-to-Pose Video Editing for Dynamic Human Actions

We introduce a novel text-to-pose video editing method, ReimaginedAct. While existing video editing tasks are limited to changes in attributes, backgrounds, and styles, our method aims to predict open-ended human action changes in video. Moreover, our method can accept not only direct instructional text prompts but also `what if' questions to predict possible action changes. ReimaginedAct comprises video understanding, reasoning, and editing modules. First, an LLM is utilized initially to obtain a plausible answer for the instruction or question, which is then used for (1) prompting Grounded-SAM to produce bounding boxes of relevant individuals and (2) retrieving a set of pose videos that we have collected for editing human actions. The retrieved pose videos and the detected individuals are then utilized to alter the poses extracted from the original video. We also employ a timestep blending module to ensure the edited video retains its original content except where necessary modifications are needed. To facilitate research in text-to-pose video editing, we introduce a new evaluation dataset, WhatifVideo-1.0. This dataset includes videos of different scenarios spanning a range of difficulty levels, along with questions and text prompts. Experimental results demonstrate that existing video editing methods struggle with human action editing, while our approach can achieve effective action editing and even imaginary editing from counterfactual questions.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 11, 2024

4K4DGen: Panoramic 4D Generation at 4K Resolution

The blooming of virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies has driven an increasing demand for the creation of high-quality, immersive, and dynamic environments. However, existing generative techniques either focus solely on dynamic objects or perform outpainting from a single perspective image, failing to meet the needs of VR/AR applications. In this work, we tackle the challenging task of elevating a single panorama to an immersive 4D experience. For the first time, we demonstrate the capability to generate omnidirectional dynamic scenes with 360-degree views at 4K resolution, thereby providing an immersive user experience. Our method introduces a pipeline that facilitates natural scene animations and optimizes a set of 4D Gaussians using efficient splatting techniques for real-time exploration. To overcome the lack of scene-scale annotated 4D data and models, especially in panoramic formats, we propose a novel Panoramic Denoiser that adapts generic 2D diffusion priors to animate consistently in 360-degree images, transforming them into panoramic videos with dynamic scenes at targeted regions. Subsequently, we elevate the panoramic video into a 4D immersive environment while preserving spatial and temporal consistency. By transferring prior knowledge from 2D models in the perspective domain to the panoramic domain and the 4D lifting with spatial appearance and geometry regularization, we achieve high-quality Panorama-to-4D generation at a resolution of (4096 times 2048) for the first time. See the project website at https://4k4dgen.github.io.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 19, 2024 1

EpipolarNVS: leveraging on Epipolar geometry for single-image Novel View Synthesis

Novel-view synthesis (NVS) can be tackled through different approaches, depending on the general setting: a single source image to a short video sequence, exact or noisy camera pose information, 3D-based information such as point clouds etc. The most challenging scenario, the one where we stand in this work, only considers a unique source image to generate a novel one from another viewpoint. However, in such a tricky situation, the latest learning-based solutions often struggle to integrate the camera viewpoint transformation. Indeed, the extrinsic information is often passed as-is, through a low-dimensional vector. It might even occur that such a camera pose, when parametrized as Euler angles, is quantized through a one-hot representation. This vanilla encoding choice prevents the learnt architecture from inferring novel views on a continuous basis (from a camera pose perspective). We claim it exists an elegant way to better encode relative camera pose, by leveraging 3D-related concepts such as the epipolar constraint. We, therefore, introduce an innovative method that encodes the viewpoint transformation as a 2D feature image. Such a camera encoding strategy gives meaningful insights to the network regarding how the camera has moved in space between the two views. By encoding the camera pose information as a finite number of coloured epipolar lines, we demonstrate through our experiments that our strategy outperforms vanilla encoding.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 24, 2022