MagicTime: Time-lapse Video Generation Models as Metamorphic Simulators
Authors: name: Shenghai Yuan, name: Jinfa Huang, name: Yujun Shi, name: Yongqi Xu, name: Ruijie Zhu, name: Bin Lin, name: Xinhua Cheng, name: Li Yuan, name: Jiebo Luo

Recent advances in Text-to-Video generation (T2V) have achieved remarkable
success in synthesizing high-quality general videos from textual descriptions.
A largely overlooked problem in T2V is that existing models have not adequately
encoded physical knowledge of the real world, thus generated videos tend to
have limited motion and poor variations. In this paper, we propose
MagicTime, a metamorphic time-lapse video generation model, which
learns real-world physics knowledge from time-lapse videos and implements
metamorphic generation. First, we design a MagicAdapter scheme to decouple
spatial and temporal training, encode more physical knowledge from metamorphic
videos, and transform pre-trained T2V models to generate metamorphic videos.
Second, we introduce a Dynamic Frames Extraction strategy to adapt to
metamorphic time-lapse videos, which have a wider variation range and cover
dramatic object metamorphic processes, thus embodying more physical knowledge
than general videos. Finally, we introduce a Magic Text-Encoder to improve the
understanding of metamorphic video prompts. Furthermore, we create a time-lapse
video-text dataset called ChronoMagic, specifically curated to unlock
the metamorphic video generation ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the
superiority and effectiveness of MagicTime for generating high-quality and
dynamic metamorphic videos, suggesting time-lapse video generation is a
promising path toward building metamorphic simulators of the physical world.