TRACE: Object Motion Editing in Videos with First-Frame Trajectory Guidance

Quynh Phung1*    Long Mai2    Cusuh Ham2    Feng Liu2    Jia-Bin Huang1    Aniruddha Mahapatra2
1 University of Maryland, College Park     2 Adobe Research
PDF arXiv BibTeX

Teaser

Step 1: Given an input video, the user draws a trajectory on the first frame to specify the desired object motion.

Step 2: Our cross-view motion transformation module converts the first-frame trajectory into dense per-frame motion correspondences across all video frames by accounting for the camera motion in the video.

Step 3: A video resynthesis model generates the final edited video, moving the object along the specified path while preserving the visual quality of the original input video and seamlessly inpainting the region where the object previously appeared.

Our Results (First-Frame Path Design)

Loading prompts...
Input Video
First-Frame Path
First Frame
Edited Video

Multiple Path Designs for Same Input

Input Video
Prompt
Box 1
Box 2
Box 3
First-Frame Path
Edited Video

Full Pipeline Comparison with Baselines

Input Video
First-Frame Path
First-Frame Path
Prompt
Magic Motion
Wan Move
Motion Canvas
PISCO
Hunyuan
VACE
GenCompositor
Trace (Ours)

Applications

Object Insertion with Motion Control

Adding a deer
Overlay reference
Adding a child
Overlay reference
Adding a man
Overlay reference
Input Video
Edited Video

Object Editing

Rainbow smoke
Rainbow turtle
Wearing VR headset
Input Video
Edited Video

Object Replacement

Child → Penguin
Buffalo → Tiger
Kite → Airplane
Input Video
Edited Video

Zero shot multi object editing

Input Video
First-Frame Path
Two objects frame
Edited Video

Cross-View Motion Transformation - Baseline Comparison

Input Video
First-Frame Path
First-Frame Path
Interpolation
MegaSAM based warping
DepthAnything-v3 based warping
TRACE (Ours)

Video Resynthesis - Baseline Comparison

Input Video
Masked Video
Prompt
Magic Motion
Wan Move
Motion Canvas
PISCO
Hunyuan
VACE
GenCompositor
TRACE (Ours)

BibTeX

@article{phung2026trace, title={TRACE: Object Motion Editing in Videos with First-Frame Trajectory Guidance}, author={Phung, Quynh and Mai, Long and Ham, Cusuh and Liu, Feng and Huang, Jia-Bin and Mahapatra, Aniruddha}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.25707}, year={2026} }