MiniMax H3 Clip Bin Tree Picker (Lineage Graph)

MiniMax H3 gives you 4–15 seconds at a time. Anything longer is a chain of clips, and the moment you start re-generating "take 3" of shot 2 and continuing from it, a flat list of filenames stops being enough. This node is the answer to that specific mess: the same Clip Bin loader you'd normally use, but it opens as a DAG tree of your clips and their parents.

The pack it lives in is one author's (knoic) attempt to wrap that segmented long-video problem in a real workflow: archive the clip, pick what to continue from, stitch. The Tree Picker is the browsing half, in "show me the story so far" mode.

What actually makes it different from the plain Picker

Under the hood the two node classes are nearly the same thing. MiniMaxClipBinTreePicker in the pack source subclasses the gallery picker and changes one thing: view_mode defaults to Tree (关系树) instead of Deck (卡片流).

That matters more than it sounds, because the tree isn't decorative. The frontend fetches /minimax/clip_bin/list, then builds a forest from each clip's parent_clip_id: clips with a parent become children, clips without one become roots. It walks your selected clip's ancestors and tags them, so you can see at a glance which are the main line (🔗), which are side branches (🌿), which are roots (🌱), and which one is the current relay source (🎯). There's also a virtual "Auto 初始镜头" card at the top - click it and the selection resets to latest, which on an empty bin means a fresh first clip.

Where people get burned: this only works if you wired clip_id into the Saver's parent_clip_id on the previous generation. Skip that and every clip is a root - your "tree" is a row of orphan cards. It still picks fine; it just can't tell you anything.

The inputs worth setting

Everything below is straight from the node's declared schema.

project_name is a plain text box, not a dropdown. It maps to a folder under ComfyUI/output/minimax_h3_bins/<name>/, and each clip inside gets its own directory with latent.safetensors, first/tail frame PNGs, a preview card, and a meta.json. Typo it and you get a brand-new empty project - which, in Auto, means the node decides you're generating a first clip and hands you no context at all. There's no dropdown of your existing bins, so the bin you meant and the bin you typed can quietly be two different places; the console logs the names it knows about.

mode is the one input to think about. Auto is the good default: empty bin → initial generation, non-empty bin → continue the newest qualifying clip with no rewiring. Force Initial ignores the library and starts a new branch. Strict Chaining raises an error when there's nothing to continue from - what you want for an unattended batch.

filter_rating and clip_selection are your quality gate. Ratings are 1–5 stars, set on the Saver, and clip_selection takes latest, a literal clip_id, or a shot_tag substring - so "rain" finds your rain shots. Note that latest means newest after filtering, and that if your star filter matches nothing the node silently falls back to the whole bin with only a console warning. Ask for ⭐⭐⭐⭐+ on a project where everything is 3 and you'll get the 3-star clip anyway.

view_mode defaults to the tree here; flip it to Deck from the node header. custom_clip_path is the escape hatch for a bin folder outside the standard tree - but pass a path that isn't a real directory and it quietly falls back to the normal project lookup instead of erroring.

Outputs

Five of them: latent, tail_frame, first_frame, prompt, clip_id. The latent is the full joint audio+video H3 latent, repacked so it drops straight into the Continuation Applier's context_latent. tail_frame is the last frame as an IMAGE - handy as an i2v-style reference - and prompt is the prompt stored when that clip was saved. clip_id goes into the next Saver's parent_clip_id, and that wire is what grows the tree.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/knoic/ComfyUI-MiniMaxH3-PrefixStream.git
cd ComfyUI-MiniMaxH3-PrefixStream
pip install -r requirements.txt

The dependency list is refreshingly boring - torch, safetensors, pillow. No FFmpeg unless you use the separate disk-streaming node. It's also on ComfyUI Manager; search the pack title. After installing, restart and hit Ctrl + F5. That hard refresh isn't optional: the tree is drawn by the pack's own web/ extension, and a stale cache gives you the node with no gallery in it.

Gotchas worth knowing

Strict Chaining on an empty project is a wall, not a warning. In initial mode the node returns latent=None plus a placeholder image and the id [INITIAL_GENERATION] - which is why the pack also ships Safe VAE Decode nodes, so a first-clip run doesn't crash downstream. The delete button on a tree card really does delete the clip directory off disk, no recycle bin. And worth saying out loud: H3's open weights are geofenced out of the US, EU, UK and Korea under the Community License, so if you're in one of those territories you're on the hosted API path, not this one.

It's a single-author pack with essentially no community footprint yet. For a linear workflow the plain Deck Picker is enough. The moment you start exploring branches - two endings from the same shot 5 - this is the node you want.