Generative AI for Video Trailer Synthesis: From Extractive Heuristics to Autoregressive Creativity

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution of automatic video trailer generation from heuristic methods to advanced generative models, highlighting recent AI techniques like LLMs, diffusion models, and foundation models.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of generative techniques for trailer synthesis, introduces a new taxonomy, and discusses future directions beyond extractive methods.

Findings

Deep generative models enable coherent, emotionally resonant trailers.

Transition from heuristic extraction to autoregressive and foundation models.

Discussion of ethical and economic implications of neural synthesis.

Abstract

The domain of automatic video trailer generation is currently undergoing a profound paradigm shift, transitioning from heuristic-based extraction methods to deep generative synthesis. While early methodologies relied heavily on low-level feature engineering, visual saliency, and rule-based heuristics to select representative shots, recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), and diffusion-based video synthesis have enabled systems that not only identify key moments but also construct coherent, emotionally resonant narratives. This survey provides a comprehensive technical review of this evolution, with a specific focus on generative techniques including autoregressive Transformers, LLM-orchestrated pipelines, and text-to-video foundation models like OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo. We analyze the architectural progression from Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to Trailer Generation Transformers (TGT), evaluate the economic implications of automated content velocity on User-Generated Content (UGC) platforms, and discuss the ethical challenges posed by high-fidelity neural synthesis. By synthesizing insights from recent literature, this report establishes a new taxonomy for AI-driven trailer generation in the era of foundation models, suggesting that future promotional video systems will move beyond extractive selection toward controllable generative editing and semantic reconstruction of trailers.