Auto-Director: Leveraging Multi-Agent Collaboration for Autonomous Video Editing

Overview & Synopsis

Autonomous video editing from open-world resources remains a challenging problem in multimedia content creation. Retrieval-based methods are constrained by fixed source material and lack creative flexibility, while generative models struggle with long-horizon coherence and often diverge from user intent. Both paradigms fail to replicate the structured, multi-stage reasoning that underlies professional post-production. To address these limitations, we present Auto-Director, a tool-augmented multi-agent framework that mirrors professional editorial workflows: a Planning Agent decomposes abstract topics into fact-grounded scripts via retrieval-augmented planning; a Material Agent indexes open-world footage through shot segmentation and visual tagging; an Editor Agent assembles semantically aligned clips with MLLM-driven spatial adaptation; and a Critic Agent governs an iterative Reflect-and-Revise loop that checks scene-level alignment and pacing. To rigorously evaluate this new paradigm, we introduce VEdit-Bench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated topics with human-annotated Golden Scripts and a five-dimensional metric suite covering Narrative Logic, Factual Accuracy, Semantic Alignment, Compositional Quality, and Stylistic Cohesion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Auto-Director significantly outperforms baseline methods in both automated metrics and human evaluation, effectively bridging the gap between amateurs and professional-grade video production.