As an essential movie promotional tool, trailers are designed to capture the audience's interest through the skillful editing of key movie shots. Although some attempts have been made for automatic trailer generation, existing methods often rely on predefined rules or manual fine-grained annotations and fail to fully leverage the multi-modal information of movies, resulting in unsatisfactory trailer generation results. In this study, we introduce a weakly-supervised trailer generation method driven by multi-modal semantic consistency. Specifically, we design a multi-modal trailer generation framework that selects and sorts key movie shots based on input music and movie metadata (e.g., category tags and plot keywords) and adds narration to the generated trailer based on movie subtitles. We utilize two pseudo-scores derived from the proposed framework as labels and thus train the model under a weakly-supervised learning paradigm, ensuring trailerness consistency for key shot selection and emotion consistency for key shot sorting, respectively. As a result, we can learn the proposed model solely based on movie-trailer pairs without any fine-grained annotations. Both objective experimental results and subjective user studies demonstrate the superior performance of our method over previous works. The code is available at https://github.com/Dixin-Lab/MMSC.

Trailer generation is a challenging video clipping task that aims to select highlighting shots from long videos like movies and re-organize them in an attractive way. In this study, we propose an inverse partial optimal transport (IPOT) framework to achieve music-guided movie trailer generation. In particular, we formulate the trailer generation task as selecting and sorting key movie shots based on audio shots, which involves matching the latent representations across visual and acoustic modalities. We learn a multi-modal latent representation model in the proposed IPOT framework to achieve this aim. In this framework, a two-tower encoder derives the latent representations of movie and music shots, respectively, and an attention-assisted Sinkhorn matching network parameterizes the grounding distance between the shots' latent representations and the distribution of the movie shots. Taking the correspondence between the movie shots and its trailer music shots as the observed optimal transport plan defined on the grounding distances, we learn the model by solving an inverse partial optimal transport problem, leading to a bi-level optimization strategy. We collect real-world movies and their trailers to construct a dataset with abundant label information called CMTD and, accordingly, train and evaluate various automatic trailer generators. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our IPOT method consistently shows superiority in subjective visual effects and objective quantitative measurements. The code is available at https://github.com/Dixin-Lab/Automatic-Movie-Trailer-Generator.