VividCam: Learning Unconventional Camera Motions from Virtual Synthetic Videos

Incorporating camera intrinsics into video generation models offers a principled way to control not only scene dynamics but also the imaging process that governs visual appearance. Prior work has primarily focused on extrinsic control, such as camera pose and motion, while treating intrinsic camera parameters as implicit or fixed. A key bottleneck is the lack of large-scale video datasets with accurate and diverse temporally varying camera metadata, which makes learning absolute camera parameterizations difficult. As a result, current models struggle to incorporate photographic camera behavior, including depth-of-field transitions, exposure variations, lens distortions, and color processing, in a controllable and temporally consistent manner. We introduce DeltaCam, a video diffusion framework that models camera behavior through $Δ$-parameterized neural camera adaptors, operating on relative changes in camera motion and intrinsics instead of absolute states. By learning this differential formulation from synthetic video data, we mitigate reliance on precise real-world camera labels and enable smooth, consistent control over imaging factors such as focal length, aperture, ISO, color temperature, and lens distortion. We extend this framework to real-world footage through two mechanisms: finetuning the controls on real image-metadata pairs for precise shot matching, and extracting disentangled embeddings for implicit video-to-video style transfer without requiring explicit camera parameters. By effectively separating scene content from intrinsic imaging behavior, DeltaCam enables camera-consistent video generation and editing operations that are difficult to achieve with existing models. Ultimately, our results establish a practical and scalable approach for bridging synthetic control and real-world photographic emulation.

For artistic applications, video generation requires fine-grained control over both performance and cinematography, i.e., the actor's motion and the camera trajectory. We present ActCam, a zero-shot method for video generation that jointly transfers character motion from a driving video into a new scene and enables per-frame control of intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters. ActCam builds on any pretrained image-to-video diffusion model that accepts conditioning in terms of scene depth and character pose. Given a source video with a moving character and a target camera motion, ActCam generates pose and depth conditions that remain geometrically consistent across frames. We then run a single sampling process with a two-phase conditioning schedule: early denoising steps condition on both pose and sparse depth to enforce scene structure, after which depth is dropped and pose-only guidance refines high-frequency details without over-constraining the generation. We evaluate ActCam on multiple benchmarks spanning diverse character motions and challenging viewpoint changes. We find that, compared to pose-only control and other pose and camera methods, ActCam improves camera adherence and motion fidelity, and is preferred in human evaluations, especially under large viewpoint changes. Our results highlight that careful camera-consistent conditioning and staged guidance can enable strong joint camera and motion control without training. Project page: https://elkhomar.github.io/actcam/.

Modern image-and-text-to-video diffusion models can synthesize highly realistic videos by iteratively denoising an initial Gaussian noise tensor conditioned on reference image and text inputs. However, existing approaches still lack precise and unified controllability over both object motion and camera motion within a single generation process. We present UniCaMo, a unified framework that enables simultaneous control of object trajectories and camera viewpoints by directly constructing the input noise of the diffusion model. Specifically, UniCaMo builds a shared 3D-grounded motion-consistent noise space across latent video frames. Sparse 3D point tracks are used to warp the Gaussian noise of the reference frame along desired object trajectories, while a virtual spherical noise representation provides globally consistent noise values for newly revealed scene regions under camera motion. By combining local track-guided noise warping with global sphere-based noise sampling, UniCaMo maintains geometric and temporal consistency under both object movement and viewpoint changes. Because UniCaMo modifies only the input noise, it requires no auxiliary adapters, control branches, or architectural changes to the underlying video diffusion model. With lightweight LoRA fine-tuning on large pretrained video diffusion models, including Wan 2.1 (14B), UniCaMo achieves state-of-the-art results in both video quality and motion controllability on standard controllable video generation benchmarks.