Thinking on Shots: Consistent Multi-Shot Video Editing with Agentic Reasoning

Video editing has become essential in digital media creation, yet existing automated systems are restricted to short segment processing and domain-specific tasks. They face two critical limitations: i) inability to handle diverse video comprehension and editing operations, and ii) lack of long-video understanding for coherent narrative creation. We propose VideoAgent, an all-in-one agentic framework addressing these challenges through two key innovations. First, we develop automated video shot creation with shot planning agents for coherent narratives and cross-modal retrieval for aligned visual content. Second, we design a multi-agent orchestration framework integrating over thirty specialized editing agents. Intent parsing filters relevant tools while textual-gradient graph optimization assembles complex editing pipelines. Extensive experiments on our newly-proposed VideoEdit benchmark and public datasets demonstrate VideoAgent's superiority over existing multimodal LLMs and agentic systems. VideoAgent achieves 87-95% orchestration success rates while reducing API costs by 60%. Human evaluation across six video categories shows VideoAgent produces professional-quality content approaching human-level performance, with ratings only 4% below human-created videos. We release our code at https://github.com/HKUDS/VideoAgent.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of performing consistent, unified modifications to a multi-shot video sequence. This task is particularly challenging because multi-shot videos consist of discontinuous temporal segments that vary significantly in viewpoint, camera scale, and subject pose, leading to severe identity drift and cumulative error propagation. Achieving coherent edits requires establishing reliable cross-shot semantic awareness to maintain stable subject appearance and visual continuity across these disjointed boundaries. To address this, we propose MSEditor, the first framework designed specifically for consistent multi-shot video editing. To overcome the scarcity of high-quality multi-shot training data, we repurpose existing multi-view video datasets to provide robust cross-shot supervision. Architecturally, we introduce a Supervisory Adapter that injects this cross-shot information into the diffusion backbone, enabling the model to learn identity-consistent representations. Furthermore, to effectively mitigate cumulative errors and ensure long-range temporal coherence, we design a Cross-Shot Packing strategy that dynamically aggregates information from semantically related shots within the self-attention window. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSEditor significantly outperforms existing methods on our curated multi-shot video editing benchmark in terms of identity preservation, temporal stability, and overall visual quality.

Recent multi-shot audio-video generators can produce increasingly coherent and cinematic outputs, but coherence does not imply the ability to execute editing techniques. Professional editing depends on shot structure, transition grammar, audio-video cut relations, and montage, yet existing benchmarks largely rely on proxies such as content quality, synchronization, or physical plausibility, systematically missing whether such editing instructions are actually executed. We introduce CutCraft, the first benchmark for editing-technique execution in multi-shot audio-video generation. CutCraft extends structured multi-shot prompts with explicit editing specifications and is paired with a hierarchical hybrid evaluation framework that combines shot-structure alignment, expert-model metrics, tool-grounded multimodal judgment, and rubric-based question answering. Beyond evaluation, we design an agentic editing baseline that decomposes generation into planning, shot-level synthesis, and post-hoc composition, explicitly realizing editing semantics such as J-cuts, L-cuts, and transition timing. Across 13 state-of-the-art closed- and open-source models, CutCraft reveals a consistent gap between coherence and editing-technique execution: current systems often produce plausible multi-shot videos yet fail to execute editorial instructions reliably. We find unstable shot structures, weak control of transition execution, and sharp degradation on higher-order montage, while aesthetic quality is only weakly correlated with editing-technique compliance. The benchmark and metrics, and the editing agent baseline are available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/cut-craft-bench.