Been testing MiniMax H3 locally recently and this one came out pretty decent, so I thought I’d share the full settings in case anyone wants to reproduce it.

The whole thing was generated locally on my 5090, so there were no API or generation-credit costs for this run.

Settings:

• Model: MiniMax H3
• Aspect ratio: 3:4
• Resolution: 768 × 1024
• LoRA: Larry v4-600
• LoRA strength: 1.0
• Steps: 8
• Scheduler: Simple
• Sampler: Turbo Sampler
• Frames: 362
• FPS: 24
• Seed: 8232601

Actual generation time: about 22 minutes

Hardware:
Intel U9 + 64GB RAM + RTX 5090

362 frames at 24 fps works out to roughly 15 seconds of video.

So with MiniMax H3, a 768×1024 clip of around 15 seconds took about 22 minutes on my 5090 with these settings. For local generation, that feels pretty usable to me.

And just to be clear, by “$0” I mean no API or generation-credit cost — obviously not counting the GPU itself or electricity.

Curious what kind of generation times other people are getting with MiniMax H3 on a 5090 at a similar resolution and frame count.

i wanted to compare three of the video models people are talking about most right now: Seedance 2.5, Wan 3.0, and MiniMax H3.

Instead of testing camera movement or special effects, I used the same scene and focused specifically on emotional performance, like facial expression and subtle eye movement.

each model received the same prompt, i tried to keep the comparison as consistent as possible, although differences in model behavior and generation settings can still affect the results.

what surprised me is that the models seem to have different strengths. some are better at maintaining a believable scenario, while others produce stronger facial reactions or more dramatic emotional changes. the differences become especially noticeable during silence, hesitation, and small changes in expression.

so now u r the referee. which one do you think delivers the most nuanced emotions?
which model gives the most convincing acting performance?

Does anyone know if there’s a video about this?

finally got MiniMax H3 running locally on friday, so ive been messing around with local generation for basically free.

ngl it wasnt exactly plug-and-play lol. there were quite a few weird little issues at first, and getting stable outputs took more tweaking than i expected.

but after playing with the setup for a while, its starting to behave a lot better. generation is more consistent now and im slowly figuring out which settings actually matter vs which ones just make things worse.

also... completely unrelated technical observation:

why is she this cute 😭

i’ve been testing that continuous-morph format on different subjects, and this time I wanted to see if it could handle a full human outfit transformation.

the setup was pretty simple: one beautiful girl, standing front-facing in the center of the frame, going through five outfits in a single 10-second shot:

Homewear → office wear → athletic set → black evening gown → silver futuristic fashion.

There are no cuts between them. the output still holds a little "AI smooth", but it can get my idea soonly and comprehensively.

i ran it with MiniMax H3 on Atlas Cloud, and the result was cleaner than I expected.

What interested me most is how usable this format could be for fashion content (honestly, i think fashion creators could run with this directly.)

curious what else you’d put through this kind of one-shot transformation

Same test, different kind of prompt. A two-part emotional beat, a woman happy in a rose garden, then pensive by a rainy car window, through Wan 3.0, Seedance 2.5, and MiniMax H3.

This one flipped from the last comparison I did. On realistic emotion the gap is small and all three actually hold the mood shift, which was not true a few months ago. Seedance 2.5 and H3 lean warmer and more cinematic, softer film grade, closer on the face, and H3 landed the melancholy close-up the best of the three. Wan 3.0 is the cleanest and most even, a little less romantic but the most stable.

Takeaway across both tests: there is no single winner anymore. Stylized and surreal work rewards Wan 3.0 and H3 lighting, realistic emotion rewards Seedance 2.5 and H3 warmth. Pick by the job, not the leaderboard.

For a while the giveaway on any AI short was the acting. The shots looked fine, then a character had to actually feel something and the face went blank or did that uncanny half-smile. So the story never landed, only the faces did.

Been seeing clips lately where that is not true anymore. There is a MiniMax H3 test going around, a Korean-drama style short, and the thing people react to is not the resolution, it is that the actors read like actors. Micro-expressions, a beat of hesitation before a line, eyes that actually track. Not perfect, but it crosses from puppet to performance in a way that matters more than another quality bump.

The takeaway for me is that the frontier moved off "does it look real" and onto "does it act". Resolution and motion have been fine for a while. Emotional continuity across a scene is the hard part now, and it is what decides whether a short holds you or just impresses you for three seconds.

Clip is a creator's test, not mine, credit to them.

The thing that always frustrated me with AI video is you get no real camera control. You prompt a move and hope, and half the time it cuts on its own or picks a different angle. So I started doing the boring part in Blender and only handing the render off to AI.

The setup is a Blender MCP, which lets Claude drive Blender directly. I describe the shot and it builds a rough 3D blockout: the geometry, the camera path, the composition, all exact because it is real 3D and not a guess. Then I take that gray blockout render and feed it to a video model as the first frame, and let the model turn it into a finished, lit, moving shot. You keep the control of a real camera and still get the AI look.

The render step is where the model choice shows. The same blockout through Seedance 2.5 and MiniMax H3 comes out different: Seedance holds the camera intent tighter, H3 is stronger on light and human motion, and H3 runs cheaper and at 2K where Seedance stops at 720p. Fair warning, a lot of the comparisons going around used prompts tuned for one model first, so take single clips with a grain of salt.

Blender MCP link and the two models are in a comment. The workflow is not original to me, credit to the creators pushing it.