When and How to Cut Classical Concerts? A Multimodal Automated Video Editing Approach

Abstract: Automated video editing remains an underexplored task in the computer vision and multimedia domains, especially when contrasted with the growing interest in video generation and scene understanding. In this work, we address the specific challenge of editing multicamera recordings of classical music concerts by decomposing the problem into two key sub-tasks: when to cut and how to cut. Building on recent literature, we propose a novel multimodal architecture for the temporal segmentation task (when to cut), which integrates log-mel spectrograms from the audio signals, plus an optional image embedding, and scalar temporal features through a lightweight convolutional-transformer pipeline. For the spatial selection task (how to cut), we improve the literature by updating from old backbones, e.g. ResNet, with a CLIP-based encoder and constraining distractor selection to segments from the same concert. Our dataset was constructed following a pseudo-labeling approach, in which raw video data was automatically clustered into coherent shot segments. We show that our models outperformed previous baselines in detecting cut points and provide competitive visual shot selection, advancing the state of the art in multimodal automated video editing.