H3 Story Director — Clean Cuts

H3 Story Director - Clean Cuts is the sibling of the main H3 Story Director that treats every scene like a new setup: after each hard cut, the camera position, angle, lens, framing and movement are free to change, while identity, wardrobe, story state and persistent props carry through. Think of the base Director as "one continuous take with the same camera language" and this as "an editor who cuts between angles." If your multi-scene H3 piece keeps coming out looking like one locked-off shot with characters teleporting between beats, this is the node that fixes the second problem.

It's the same Director under the hood - same OpenRouter call, same structured validation, same plan_json → Chain Plan flow - plus one crucial extra rule and one extra input.

How it works

Mechanically, Clean Cuts is the base Director with a block of mandatory clean-cut direction appended to its system prompt, and a new input that anchors continuity. The rule set is specific:

• Every scene is an independent cinematic shot after a hard cut. It preserves narrative state, identity, wardrobe, hairstyle, accessories, physical changes and persistent props - but it must not continue the previous camera path, composition, exact pose or body motion.
• Scene 1 never references the continuity tag (there's no preceding scene).
• From scene 2 onward, the node injects the exact continuity tag as the authoritative visual-state reference: current wardrobe, hair, physical changes, props, location state. Your original uploaded reference images become secondary identity anchors only - they're told explicitly never to restore an obsolete outfit, pose or background.

That last bit is the clever part. The uploaded <Picture 1> is who the character was; the continuity reference is who they are now. Clean Cuts keeps those separate instead of letting a stale reference photo fight the story's accumulated state.

The new input

• cut_continuity_reference - a combo defaulting to <Picture 4>. This is the tag that carries visual state from scene 2 onward, and it must match the continuity-sheet input position on MiniMax H3 Reference to Video. If your H3 workflow has the continuity sheet on a different picture slot, change this to match, or the whole chain-of-state scheme falls apart.

Everything else is the familiar Director surface: story_idea, scene_count, scene_duration_seconds, director_mode, genre, motion_style, draft_only, up to four reference images, and the full output set - plan_json, scene_prompt, mode_prompt, story_bible, synopsis, validation, usage_stats, credits_remaining, source_video_analysis.

Install

Same pack, same command:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/elgalardi/ComfyUI-VisionPromptAssistant

Restart ComfyUI. It needs the OpenRouter key like the base node - same masked api_key field, same warning that the value can end up serialized in a shared workflow, so strip it before distributing anything.

Where to reach for it

Choose between the base Director and Clean Cuts based on the edit you actually want. Continuous Story in the base node is for a flowing, connected sequence. Clean Cuts is for anything that reads like a montage or a properly edited scene list - music videos, product cuts, anything where each shot earns its own framing. Start small: three scenes, draft_only on, review the synced cards before you spend a render. And check that cut_continuity_reference lines up with your H3 Reference to Video continuity sheet position before you trust it - that's the one setting that's easy to miss and expensive to discover late.