FilmBench evaluates cinematic video generation with film-school shot lists and 35 metrics

Shengyi Wang · hf · 2026-07-28

The authors introduce FilmBench, a film-grade benchmark for cinematic video generation.

It covers both text-to-video (T2V) and reference-to-video (R2V).
Prompts are reverse-engineered from award-winning films across 20 cinematic genres and aligned with real shot lists.
The benchmark is co-developed with directors and faculty from the Beijing Film Academy and the Hujing Digital Media & Entertainment Group studio.
Evaluation uses a three-level cinematic taxonomy with 3 axes, 12 components, and 35 T2V + 3 R2V-only sub-metrics.
The team also builds an in-house expert-grade evaluation agent and open-sources FilmOps, its core operator suite.
On 9 T2V and 7 R2V models, the evaluator matches human ranking very closely, with Spearman correlation of 0.95 and 0.96.
Scores are lower than on prior web-style benchmarks, revealing gaps in dynamic aesthetics and a strong drop from single-shot to multi-shot generation.

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