CINEMA-Bench: Benchmarking Cinematic Expressiveness Capabilities of Multi-Shot Video Generation

Recent advances in video generation have moved toward multi-shot creation, approaching professional video production. However, the field still lacks a clear definition of cinematic expression capabilities and quantitative evaluation protocols to benchmark the progress. To fill this gap, we present CINEMA-Bench (CINematic Expressiveness in Multi-shot Video Assessment), a reference-grounded benchmark for evaluating the cinematic expression of multi-shot video generation models. Inspired by established film theory, we propose a hierarchical ”Vocabulary–Grammar–Rhythm” taxonomy spanning three levels and 21 dimensions, covering shot-level camera language, inter-shot continuity grammar, and sequence-level temporal perception. We construct a multi-shot hierarchical prompt suite derived from real-world films and TV series across Mikels’ eight emotions. We further design automatic metrics validated by human alignment to assess cinematic composition from the Director’s Perspective, and complement them with user studies from the Audience’s Perspective. Systematic evaluation of six state-of-the-art multi-shot video generation models reveals that, despite reasonable use of cinematic elements, current methods still exhibit notable gaps in inter-shot continuity, rhythm and emotional delivery, shot-count controllability, and audience perception, offering actionable insights for cinematically expressive video generation. This work presents an early exploration toward a comprehensive definition and quantification of cinematic expressiveness, bridging artistic expressiveness and computational evaluation.