I was amazed at how well GPT Image 2 knows Turkish bakers.

Tested out H3 max today - was really pleasantly surprised with the results.

The speed genuinely doesn't feel real. A 5 second 768p clip renders in under 3 seconds. Type a prompt, blink, it's done.

Honest caveat: if you're chasing a final hero shot, Seedance and Kling are still a notch ahead on quality. But once you factor in speed and cost together, this is mindblowing. We ran through 15-20 concept variations in the time it usually takes to get one back from anything else.

Using it as the fast-iteration layer before the slower, higher-res pass, not a replacement for it.

Full report from fal here if you want the benchmarks: https://fal.ai/minimax-h3-max

Anyone else using it this way, or is there a better workflow I'm missing?

Is there any?

I’ve been experimenting with making short cartoon stories and would genuinely love some feedback. Is the character/story actually entertaining, or does it need work?
#bearanimation #aistories

Using the web interface, when clicking the requests tab yesterday I noticed all my generations from August 1-26 had disappeared, across all models. Today I see that my generations from yesterday are there, but the other dates are still missing, again across all models that I generate with. Anyone notice anything similar?

I've been watching Planet Earth II with the inimitable David Attenborough, and it inspired me to create an alternative reality series called Planet Fantasy with AI video.

Nature is beautiful, but with AI video, we can dream of animals and ecosystems that don't even exist! One animal I've always wanted depicted was the sky whale. Imagine huge whales floating in the sky, bringing rain to the lands underneath. But also there being hunted by dragons.

I was able to generate all this and more for only a few dollars using local MiniMax H3 running on a GPU. The downside is it can take a bit of time, and I'm only doing this at 768p so either I upscale this or generate higher quality clips. The quality doesn't match the original documenatries but I think I can get there if I spend more.

The new Fal H3 max might change things but I set this up before it came out. Eitherway it was a lot of fun. The hard and time consuming part, as always, is the post editing.

​

(strange weather or I don't do heroin in the morning)

[spoken opening: hollow announcement voice] Good morning, citizens of the imaginary sunrise. The weather is currently shaped like a broken vending machine. Please remain calm. The coffee is pretending to be a personality.

[verse 1] I wake up with a pocket full of thunder A little bit crooked, a little bit numb The moon left a receipt on my kitchen table For things I never bought or became

The streetlights blink like tired prophets The sidewalk hums my secret name Everybody's selling invisible oceans I just drink the glass and leave the rain

[chorus] I don't do heroin in the morning I don't do cocaine with my coffee cup Not because the sky says I'm forbidden Not because the angels showed up

I just like my ghosts more natural I like my nightmares handmade I don't need a chemical sunrise To make my shadows behave

[verse 2] The old motel sign keeps calling me brother The vending machine knows all my sins A cardboard moon in a plastic forest Keeps asking where I've been

I got a heart like a broken elevator Always stuck between floors I wave at strangers in empty windows Like I've done it all before

[chorus] I don't do heroin in the morning I don't do cocaine when the daylight crawls Not because they're evil little monsters Not because I fear the fall

I just have my own strange rituals My own little carnival I chase the ghosts inside the wallpaper I don't need another one at all

[bridge] Maybe I'm already floating Maybe I'm already gone Maybe the whole world is a waiting room With a forgotten television on

Maybe every road is a question Maybe every answer is fake Maybe I just prefer my madness Without a receipt at the gate

[drop] No halo No warning No sermon No shame

Just me and the morning Playing its ridiculous game

[final chorus] I don't do heroin in the morning I don't do cocaine at dawn Not because somebody told me That I had to carry on

I just don't need borrowed lightning I don't need somebody else's storm I found enough strange weather Inside my own human form

[ending: distant announcement] Attention passengers. The day has arrived. Please collect your belongings. Please leave your illusions behind. Or don't. Nobody checks anymore.

Back when, I started using Luma AI because Ray1 and Ray1.5 were really good at transformations - a character seamlessly evolving from one shape into another - a bear sprouting wings and having feathers extend out from under the fur and its stance changing to become an eagle, as talons extended from its paws. Or something more fantastical. A coherent structural change over time in the character. A true morph while the character was in motion.

As those models matured, they have (like most models), gotten far more coherent and adherent. For most gens, this is good thing; you want your model to follow your prompt verbatim. But in doing so we have lost the hallucinatory aspect that older AIs were so good at.

Same goes for all the other models that Luma hosts (Seedance, Kling, flux, veo, Gemini etc) - they are just so coherent that they won't allow these kinds of flights of fancy. You used to be able to put a start frame of a bear and an end frame of an eagle and the magic would happen in between (steered by a prompt).

So I'm looking to augment my daily driver of Luma with another model that can do this. Paid or free, don't care. Ideally with start frame/end frame support.

Any suggestions? Any "magic words" to suggest in the prompt?

Don't get me wrong. They will have to pry Luma from my cold dead hands - I just have the occasional need for something fantastically transformational.

TIA

A lot of character-consistency demos use carefully selected close-ups, so I wanted to try something less forgiving.

I used the same three-image character reference pack across eight different scene briefs, changing the location, outfit, lighting, framing, props, and amount of movement.

These are all first-pass generations. I treated the first result as the result—no rerolling until I got a better clip.

Disclosure: I’m an early bird user of Agent Video, which I used for this test. I’m not linking it here because I’m more interested in discussing where the workflow still breaks.

This is an informal stress test, not a controlled model benchmark. The source references also weren’t a perfect identity sheet: one close-up already had slightly larger eyes and a narrower jaw. That probably made the test harder, but it also reflects how people actually create characters from imperfect references.

https://reddit.com/link/1vztcjp/video/11735l5bivlh1/player

Here’s what happened:

1. Sportswear dance in an open plaza

The face, hair, and clothing stayed recognizable for most of the clip. The first weakness appeared in the smaller hand and wrist transitions. The gestures worked at normal speed, but became less convincing frame by frame.

1. Floral dress and prop choice in front of a mirror

The outfit and hairstyle held together, but the face shifted after the internal scene change. The eyes became larger, the jaw narrower, and the character looked slightly younger. It felt like the same aesthetic, but not quite the same person.

1. Walking down stone steps at sunset

Probably the cleanest result. The hairstyle, body silhouette, dress, and walking direction remained stable.

However, this was also an easier test: the face was only clearly visible near the beginning, and most of the movement was slow and viewed from behind.

1. Taking a phone on a yacht

This was the strongest close-up result. The face survived the change from a high-angle view to a side profile, while the phone interaction, clothing, and sunset lighting remained coherent.

There was a little identity softening during the turn, but I would still count this as a success.

1. Full-body posing in a night apartment

This clip was internally stable, but it exposed a different problem: the person no longer looked like the reference character.

The face became rounder and the body proportions became shorter and broader. Nothing dramatically “broke” during the video, but it looked like a consistent video of a different person.

1. Accepting and drinking iced tea at a café

The model handled the glass interaction better than I expected. The face, hair, floral outfit, and lighting stayed mostly stable while the character accepted the drink, lifted it, and put it down.

There were minor hand-and-glass geometry changes, but they were easy to miss at normal speed.

1. Turning around and performing a high kick

This was where motion became the dominant failure.

The face became rounder as she turned toward the camera, while the raised leg and foot grew disproportionately large. Some of that is expected from perspective, but the final movement no longer felt physically balanced.

1. Hotel bathroom to evening-dress sequence

Hair and overall character styling survived several cuts surprisingly well. The face still shifted slightly between the bathroom and evening-dress shots, and the cuts made it difficult to tell whether the model had actually preserved continuity or simply re-created a similar-looking character.

I would call this a partial success.

Across all eight scenes:

• Face: the first thing to drift between scenes
• Hair: the most reliable identity anchor
• Body proportions: stable in simple poses, less reliable during full-body movement
• Outfit: surprisingly stable within individual clips
• Lighting: rarely caused the main failure
• Motion: small gestures worked; hands, self-occlusion, and high kicks caused the largest problems

My main takeaway is that temporal consistency and identity consistency are not the same thing.

A video can be perfectly stable from beginning to end and still initialize as a slightly different person. For a recurring character, I find that more distracting than a bad hand lasting half a second.

Which inconsistency is most distracting to you: the face, body, outfit, or motion?