VideoBasic Load Video

Most "Load Video" nodes in ComfyUI slurp the whole clip into memory and hand you a giant batch of IMAGE tensors. That's exactly what makes long videos OOM your GPU later in the graph. VideoBasicLoadVideo does the opposite: it hands you a file path - a string. Nothing gets loaded, nothing sits in VRAM. Downstream nodes like the pack's VideoBasicVideoUpscaleWithModel open the file themselves and stream it frame by frame.

That's the whole philosophy of ComfyUI-VideoBasic: keep videos on disk, pass paths around, and only touch as many frames as you're actively processing.

How it works

This is a combobox, not a text box. It lists every file sitting in ComfyUI's input directory and you pick one - so the workflow stays portable (the path resolves via ComfyUI's annotated filepath handling) and the dropdown never points at a file that's gone. The node's web extension also adds a "choose video to upload" button, which pushes a video from your machine into the input folder and selects it for you, plus an inline preview so you can confirm you picked the right clip without opening a player.

Two implementation details are worth knowing. First, the node reports IS_CHANGED based on the file's modification time, so if you re-export over the same file, the node re-runs instead of being treated as a no-op. Second - and this trips people up - it only recognizes files already in the input folder, so a video you haven't put there yet won't appear in the list until you upload or copy it in.

The single output

file_path, a STRING. That's it. Wire it into anything in this pack that takes a video path - the upscale node's video_path, the merge node's video_path_1, or a save node. If you want frames instead of a path - say, to feed a diffusion pipeline or AnimateDiff - this is the wrong node. You want VideoHelperSuite's Load Video for that. The trade is real: VHS gives you tensors and OOMs on long clips; this gives you a path and never does.

Install

Same as the rest of the pack. ComfyUI Manager → search ComfyUI-VideoBasic, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/jax-explorer/ComfyUI-VideoBasic

then restart. The only pip dependency is opencv-python, pulled automatically from requirements.txt.

Gotchas

• Your video must live in ComfyUI/input to show up in the dropdown (the upload button handles that for you).
• It outputs a path string, not frames - don't try to plug it into a KSampler or a VAE decode.

Understated, but it's the node the rest of the pack hangs off. Everything else in VideoBasic assumes you got a path from somewhere; this is the sanctioned way to get one.