MiniMax Just Dropped a Open Source "Seedance Killer"
Today's video is sponsored by ElevenLabs! Try ElevenAgents and start chatting with your characters — plus grab 10,000 free credits courtesy of ElevenLabs right here: https://try.elevenlabs.io/w5183uo8pydc This is a surprise: MiniMax is BACK. After nine months of silence since Hailuo 2.3, they’ve launched Hailuo 03 (aka MiniMax H3) — a fully multimodal AI video model with native audio, up to 15-second generations at 2K, and an Omni mode that takes up to 12 image references plus video and audio inputs. Is it the Seedance killer people are claiming? I ran it through the full gauntlet to find out. In this video, we test Hailuo H3 across cinematic text-to-video (including dialogue, acting range, and multilingual support), image-to-video against the old 2.3 model, first frame/last frame, video extensions, and multi-reference character team-ups — plus what I’m seeing on pricing, which looks like it comes in around 50% under Seedance 2.0. Key takeaways: dialogue and lip sync are shockingly good, fight choreography trades speed for stability (no morphing, no teleporting), prompts cap out at a generous 7,000 characters, and the Omni model takes your storyboards very seriously — maybe more seriously than Seedance does. Note: H3 is now Open Source (couldn't say that when the video first came out) and is available over on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3 CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro: MiniMax Is Back 00:49 What's New in Hailuo 03 01:44 Dialogue & Acting Test (Twin Peaks Diner) 02:21 Cinematic Text-to-Video Tests 03:02 The Mob Movie Test 03:47 Multilingual Dialogue (Samurai Test) 04:39 Fight Scenes + the 7,000-Character Prompt Limit 06:10 Image-to-Video: Nine Months of Progress 07:03 Flamethrower Girl Returns 07:50 First Frame / Last Frame 08:30 The Omni Model: Multi-Reference 09:37 ElevenLabs Sponsor Segment 13:34 Sniper Girl One-Shot 14:13 Video References & Extensions 15:18 Sniper + Flamethrower Team-Up 16:02 "Reference Maxing" & Storyboards 17:25 Pricing Ballpark 18:23 Final Thoughts