MiniMax Hailuo 2.3

MiniMax Hailuo is the Chinese video generation family that got famous for one thing: motion that actually looks physical. Water that flows, hair that moves, characters whose limbs don't melt into each other - Hailuo's whole reputation is "the model whose videos move well," and it's a closed model you cannot run locally. That's the entire reason this node exists. The Runware pack puts Hailuo 2.3 behind a node with the model's real parameters as widgets, runs it on Runware's machines, and hands you back a native VIDEO.

For the ComfyUI crowd this is a genuinely different proposition from local video gen. Local pipelines (Wan, LTX) want a big GPU, a pile of VRAM, and half an hour of tuning per clip. Hailuo 2.3 wants none of that from you - you prompt, wait, and get a finished MP4. The trade is that it's closed and metered: every run costs money, and the community's standing advice about Runware applies - it's fast and cheap, but you can get carried away and forget you're spending.

What you set

• positivePrompt (optional here, but you want it) - describe motion and scene, not just subjects. "A cup of coffee on a rainy windowsill, steam rising, rain streaking the glass" beats "coffee."
• frameImages - the image-to-video input. Feed it a still and Hailuo animates it; this is the mode most people end up using, since it gives you control over the starting frame.
• width / height - default 1024 square.
• duration toggle + duration_value - seconds; frames = duration × the model's fps. Off uses the model's default.
• providerSettings.minimax.promptOptimizer - automatic prompt rewriting. The tooltip is blunt: it affects reproducibility. Flip it off for seed-stable runs.
• safety.mode - none, fast, or full. This is MiniMax's content-checking depth; if you're hitting unexplained refusals, check what it's set to.
• outputFormat - MP4 (default), WEBM, or MOV. outputQuality 20-99.
• numberResults - 1-4 variations.

Output is video (VIDEO), which wires into the pack's video output handling (saved to your output folder as a file).

How it works

Every node in this pack is the same shape: build a request with the model AIR and taskType, send it over REST via the Runware SDK, and convert the returned media into a ComfyUI-native type. Video runs take longer than images - the model generates tens of frames in the cloud - so expect a real queue time, and the title bar shows the cost when it lands. Hailuo is unambiguously not open source (a fact the mods of r/StableDiffusion used to enforce, since it's a closed tool), so there's no local path; the API node is the path.

Installing

ComfyUI Manager → search Runware → install → restart. Manual:

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

No model downloads; dependencies are runware-sdk, pillow, soundfile. API key via Settings → Runware API key, RUNWARE_API_KEY, or runware auth login.

Troubleshooting

Key first. If identical seeds produce different videos, promptOptimizer is rewriting your prompt - disable it. If output comes back as a path instead of a playable VIDEO, that's the pack's graceful degradation when the native video type isn't available; you'll still get the file. And watch the bill - video is the priciest thing in this pack per run.