Protoface Grok Imagine Video 1.5 · Text to Video

Short version: this node turns a sentence into a six-second video, and the only hardware it uses is whatever runs your browser. There's no Wan checkpoint in a diffusion_models folder, no 24GB VRAM floor, no ten-minute queue per clip. You write a prompt, pick a resolution and a length, and xAI's Grok Imagine Video 1.5 renders it on a server.

Whether that's the right tool depends entirely on why you're here. If you want to own the pipeline - LoRAs, ControlNets, the same character every time, no per-call cost - this isn't it, and the community's honest position is that local video models have closed a lot of the gap. If you want a moving clip today, on a laptop, and you'd rather pay a few cents than spend a weekend tuning samplers, this is a completely reasonable way to get one. There's a reason Grok Imagine keeps showing up in r/comfyui arguments as the benchmark for "cheap and fast" - that reputation is the product.

What's underneath

Grok Imagine Video 1.5 is closed-weight xAI, so there is no local option at any VRAM. Protoface is the adapter: one extension that reads a bundled catalog of 44 models and 95 tasks at import and generates a Comfy node class for each model/task pair, with the provider's public request schema re-emitted as native widgets. The trailing a95ecaf6d1100b99 in the class name is a hash of this exact model + task + schema + outputs. That matters the day xAI revises something: a schema change mints a new class, and your old one comes back labelled [Archived] and refuses to submit. Reselect the current node; the previous result is still retrievable via Resume Run.

You can also see all of this in the graph - unlike most wrappers, the media comes back as Comfy's native VIDEO type, so Save Video or a VHS combine node just takes it.

The controls

prompt is the whole creative act here - describe the shot, the subject, the camera, the light. Treat it like a shot list in one sentence, not a bag of keywords.

resolution offers 480p, 720p or 1080p, defaulting to 720p. duration is an integer, 1 to 15 seconds, default 6. These two are your bill. Drafting at 480p for two seconds and then committing at 1080p for six is the difference between a cheap session and an expensive one, and it's the single most useful habit with any metered video node.

aspect_ratio is a short list here - 16:9, 1:1, 9:16, 3:2, 2:3 - with 16:9 the default. No 21:9, no phone-ratio absurdities; this is the video model's list, not the image model's much longer one.

Then the pair that trips up every first-timer. generation_id looks like a seed and isn't. Keep it fixed and the pack reuses or resumes that same paid job; increment it (or turn on increment-after-generate) and you're buying a new render. A model seed doesn't exist here at all, so there's nothing to randomise for variety - change the prompt. request_scope is auto-assigned per node, isn't secret, and only needs supplying when you run the workflow headless, where it has to be stable.

Outputs: video (a list), files with every original asset, and run id. That run id is your receipt - hand it to Resume Run if anything goes sideways.

Installing

Requires ComfyUI 0.41.0+ and Python 3.10+. Easiest path is ComfyUI Manager: search Protoface, install protoface-nodes, restart, reload the browser. Manager's index can lag behind a fresh publication, in which case clone the tag:

git clone --branch v0.1.0 --depth 1 https://github.com/protoface-ai/protoface-comfyui.git custom_nodes/protoface
python -m pip install -r custom_nodes/protoface/requirements.txt

Four dependencies - httpx, jsonschema, Pillow, av - and they must go into ComfyUI's own interpreter. Windows portable users get this wrong constantly:

.\python_embeded\python.exe -m pip install -r .\ComfyUI\custom_nodes\protoface\requirements.txt

Then click Protoface in the lower-right corner and enter your API key. It's held in server memory, so a restart clears it - that's the number one "it broke overnight" cause with this pack. Headless installs set PROTOFACE_API_KEY or PROTOFACE_API_KEY_FILE and should keep PROTOFACE_STATE_DIR (default ~/.cache/protoface-comfyui) intact across updates, because job recovery lives there.

Worth saying plainly: this bills your Protoface account, separately from Comfy credits and from Comfy's own xAI Partner Node. Comfy Cloud won't let you install it at all. And there are currently zero Reddit threads mentioning Protoface - no community track record yet, so weigh the official route if that bothers you.

Troubleshooting, honestly

Missing dependency errors are almost always the wrong Python. Auth errors after a restart are almost always the empty key field. Timeouts and dropped browsers are almost always recoverable: keep the scope and generation_id, requeue or hunt the run id, and do not increment the generation id to force a retry - the pack journals each request before submitting and reuses the idempotency key, so a retry of unchanged inputs is free, while an incremented id is a new charge. Cancelling is best-effort upstream and isn't a refund either.