Field notes
What we learned shooting with MiniMax H3
Prompt craft, camera grammar and native audio — written up from real renders, with the settings that produced them and the ones that did not.
11 articles
Cost & pricingWhat a 2K H3 clip actually costs, and why every reseller charges more
We priced the same eight-second clip through the official API and six resellers. Direct wins, and the one provider that undercuts it is selling something else.
Aug 17, 20266 min readEditorial desk
Specs192 frames is the only whole second MiniMax H3 can give you
H3 renders in blocks of 17n+5 frames at 24 fps, so nearly every duration lands on a fraction. Exactly one setting comes out even, and you can prove it.
Aug 16, 20265 min readEditorial desk
Model & weightsDownloading the H3 weights does not give you the H3 you have been watching
MiniMax published the middle stage of a three-stage system. The prompt layer in front and the 2K layer behind are both hosted, and neither is open.
Aug 15, 20267 min readEditorial desk
Prompt craftWriting sound into an H3 prompt, and the three fields that decide what you hear
Picture and 32 kHz stereo come out of the same pass, so the audio is written in the prompt. Three fields decide what you hear, and dialogue has its own syntax.
Aug 14, 20266 min readEditorial desk
GuidesHow to use MiniMax H3: five routes into the same model
There is no single H3 app. It is one model behind five doors, and they differ by setup time, by price, and by whether the licence lets you walk through at all.
Aug 13, 20268 min readEditorial desk
GuidesMiniMax H3 open weights: what is public, and what the licence actually restricts
Two checkpoints are public and two stages are not. The licence carries a clause most coverage misses — it reaches the finished video, not just the weights.
Aug 12, 20268 min readEditorial desk
GuidesMiniMax H3 in ComfyUI: the version, the files, and the flag that stops the OOM
Native nodes shipped in 0.30.0. The fix that stops it running out of memory shipped in 0.32.0, and most guides still stop at 0.30.0. Here is the current state, with pull request numbers.
Aug 11, 20269 min readEditorial desk
GuidesMiniMax H3 local vs online: the requirement nobody quotes is a number of minutes
Every requirements table answers how much memory it takes to load. The thing that stops people is that the same 480p job runs in 182 seconds on one machine and 90 minutes on another.
Aug 10, 20268 min readEditorial desk
AlternativesMiniMax H3 vs Veo 3.1: the settings on one of them are locked to each other
The difference that decides most briefs is not quality. Above 720p, Veo 3.1 has exactly one duration — and that constraint is in Google's own parameter table.
Aug 9, 20268 min readEditorial desk
AlternativesMiniMax H3 vs Seedance 2: three versions are live, and only one of them is priced
The Seedance people put against H3 is 2.5 — which has no published rate above 720p and no score on any public blind-test board. That is a planning problem, not a quality claim.
Aug 8, 20268 min readEditorial desk
AlternativesMiniMax H3 vs MiniMax M3: one makes video, one writes code
They are not competing products. Same company, released two months apart, one letter apart in the API string — which is most of why people mix them up.
Aug 7, 20267 min readEditorial desk