Title: Beyond the Shot: Rethinking Cinematography Understanding with Foundational Skill Evaluation
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: multimodal large language models, cinematography understanding, dataset and benchmark

Abstract: Cinematography understanding refers to the ability to recognize not only the visual content of a scene but also the cinematic techniques that shape narrative meaning. This capability is attracting increasing attention, as it enhances multimodal understanding in real-world applications and underpins coherent content creation in film and media. As the most comprehensive benchmark for this task, ShotBench spans a wide range of cinematic concepts and VQA-style evaluations, with ShotVL achieving state-of-the-art results on it. However, our analysis reveals that ambiguous option design in ShotBench and ShotVL’s shortcomings in reasoning consistency and instruction adherence undermine evaluation reliability, limiting fair comparison and hindering future progress. To overcome these issues, we systematically refine ShotBench through consistent option restructuring, conduct the first critical analysis of ShotVL’s reasoning behavior, and introduce an extended evaluation protocol that jointly assesses task accuracy and core model competencies. These efforts lead to ShotBench++, a refined and expanded benchmark that enables more reliable assessment and fosters future advances in cinematography understanding. The benchmark and code will be publicly released.