Director hint based auto-cinematography

A device of generating video in three-dimensional animation environment, comprising:

• a memory and a processor coupled to the memory and configured to perform:
• obtaining and translating directorial hints for making a 3D animated movie based on user input;
• determining camera configurations in a 3D environment according to the directorial hints;
• establishing a camera search space that includes multiple candidate cameras to be used at different timestamps to shoot one or more scenes of the movie based on the camera configurations;
• performing editing optimization based on the camera search space and the directorial hints, to obtain an edited video, wherein the editing optimization is formalized into a process of finding a path with minimum cost in a graph model, each path in the graph model describing a candidate camera sequence for producing the movie, and at least some of the directorial hints are translated into cost functions of the graph model;
• and
• output the edited video as the produced 3D animated movie.