SmartDirector: Keyframe-Conditioned Cinematic Video Generation with Narrative Pacing Control

Zhida Zhang, jiema, Zhan Peng, Haoxue Wu, Yang Han, Jun Liang, Jie Cao, Jing Li

SmartDirector: Keyframe-Conditioned Cinematic Video Generation with Narrative Pacing Control: 4 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #44 of 59 papers on 2026-05-29. Day-by-day upvote history. It lost 5 votes when the Hub removed votes in bulk.

The narrative quality of a video fundamentally determines its perceptual value. Although existing video generation methods can produce visually appealing content, they predominantly rely on sparse conditioning signals such as text prompts or first/last frames, which limits precise control over narrative structure and temporal pacing. In this paper, we propose SmartDirector, a framework that enhances the narrative capacity of video generation models through multiple keyframes. SmartDirector supports flexible generation scenarios including single-shot generation, multi-shot narrative synthesis, and video extension. The framework operates in two stages: Director-Gen generates a low-resolution video conditioned on the provided keyframes, and Director-SR refines the output by exploiting high-resolution keyframes as semantic anchors to recover fine-grained details. To enable robust multi-keyframe training, we construct a data pipeline that curates single-shot and multi-shot sequences from movies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SmartDirector substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. We will release the code to facilitate further research.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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