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arXiv · 2605.27891

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

Zhida Zhang·Jie Ma·Zhan Peng·Haoxue Wu·Yang Han·Jun Liang·Jie Cao·Jing Li
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Abstract

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.

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Zhida Zhang, Jie Ma, Zhan Peng, Haoxue Wu, Yang Han, Jun Liang, Jie Cao, Jing Li. 2026-05-27. SmartDirector: Keyframe-Conditioned Cinematic Video Generation with Narrative Pacing Control. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27891

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