Seedance 2.5 Vs Minimax H3 (Open Weight). Excellent Output Comparison!

TL;DR: Seedance 2.5 and Minimax H3 are both state-of-the-art multimodal video generators. Seedance wins on high-action choreography, character consistency, and instruction following; Minimax wins on music-video-style output, price, resolution, and open-weights availability. ## Overview Two new state-of-the-art video generators were recently launched: Seedance 2.5 and Minimax H3. Both are multimodal, meaning they can take text prompts as well as images, videos, and audio as references. Both can handle common tasks like green-screen replacement, adding or replacing characters in existing videos, and changing weather, lighting, or camera angle. The tests in this review focus on more extreme, challenging, and practical use cases. ## Fight Scenes and High-Action Test The first test used a rough 3D animation plus two character reference images. The prompt was: > This character and this character are fighting in an ancient temple. Refer to this video for the pose and movements. The test was run on Lumina by BytePlus, an all-in-one platform for ByteDance and other providers' generative models. **Seedance 2.5** generated a 13-second, 720p clip. Character consistency was incredible, and the physics and motion were essentially flawless. There was one moment where it inserted a close-up face-off between the characters that wasn't in the original 3D video, but overall the output was very coherent with the reference motion. **Minimax H3** was given the same prompt and a 14-second reference video, at 2K resolution. It couldn't follow the 3D reference well, with noticeable noise and artifacts throughout the fight scene. Winner for high-action/fight scenes: Seedance. For creating 3D assets, free resources like Mixamo (pre-made character animations) and Nvidia Arty (text-prompt animation creation) were mentioned as useful tools. ## Complex Instruction Following The next test used a long, multi-step prompt: > A 3D Pixar animation, a princess wearing a glittery white dress running away from a massive dragon with glowing red eyes in a forest. The dragon breathes fire, which ignites the ground and the foliage behind her. She ducks beneath a fallen tree as the dragon crashes through it. A flock of glowing blue birds suddenly swarms the dragon's face. The princess grabs a hanging vine and swings, landing inside an abandoned golden bathtub. The bathtub rolls downhill with her inside it. She jumps out moments before it smashes into a boulder. Reaching a river, she jumps onto drifting debris to cross. She jumps from a broken door to a floating barrel, then onto the back of a confused giant turtle. She looks back to see the dragon on the shore roaring in frustration as it can't cross the river. **Seedance** allowed generation up to 30 seconds and followed everything in the prompt, essentially flawlessly. **Minimax** was limited to 15 seconds but still managed to compress the prompt into that runtime and got most details correct. The one miss: the princess didn't jump on a broken door before jumping on a floating barrel. Still very impressive for both. ## Sketch Animation to Production-Ready Clip For animation studio workflows, the test was whether a rough sketch animation could be turned into a fully colored, production-ready clip. The prompt asked for a realistic high-action cinematic video of a Japanese sorceress fighting a massive rock golem, using the exact poses, animations, and camera angles from the reference video. **Seedance** did a better job coloring the scene and making it look like polished, production-ready animation. **Minimax** tended to retain some of the original sketch elements. Point: Seedance. ## Storyboard and Logo to Commercial Both models were given a storyboard and a logo to create a luxury handbag ad, with an English voice-over. **Seedance** produced this voice-over: > Infinity. A story of timeless elegance. Carry the infinite. **Minimax** produced: > In a world of fleeting moments, true elegance remains. A quiet confidence. A journey with no bounds. Infinity. Beyond time. Both commercials were very good — arguably the best models available for this use case. The reviewer noted it's hard to pick a winner. ## UI Screenshots to Motion Graphic Ad Next, simple UI screenshots of an app plus a logo were used to create a full motion graphic commercial. The app was called Artisan Crafts, a marketplace for handmade local crafts. The prompt required a British female voice-over, a flat vector motion graphic style, and using only elements from the attached images. Both models produced decent ads with only slight lettering errors. The reviewer asked viewers to decide which they preferred. ## Music Video Generation Both models are multimodal and can accept audio references. For this test, a 15-second track generated by the open-source music generator A-Step was uploaded, plus an image of a fictional K-pop band and typography references. The prompt asked for an MV with singing/dancing, coarse grain, glitch and grunge effects, fast hard cuts within 3 seconds, cuts synced to the beat, and typography from the reference image. **Minimax** was outstanding: the song matched the upload exactly, animations and cuts synced to the beat, characters appeared to sing along, and typography looked great. **Seedance** produced a weird generation by comparison. Winner for music videos/text overlays: Minimax. ## Sponsor: Chat LLM by Abacus AI The video was sponsored by Chat LLM, an all-in-one platform for using top AI models. It supports switching between models in chats, plus top image and video generators in one integrated platform. It also has an agent feature capable of autonomously creating PowerPoints, websites, and research reports. Access to all models, image/video generators, and the agent costs $10/month. ## Multilingual Test Both models claim to support multiple languages. The test included a Chinese man, an Indian woman, a Spanish woman, German, French, Arabic, Korean, Russian, and Polish. Results were shown for both models; the reviewer noted he doesn't speak most of these languages and asked viewers to comment if either model got any language wrong. ## Extremely Challenging Prompts These prompts were designed to push the models beyond current capabilities. ### Vivaldi's Summer for Solo Violin The prompt: a solo violinist playing the solo section of Vivaldi's Summer, first movement. This tests accurate violin playing (bow movement, finger placement) and whether the model knows the piece. **Seedance** looked very realistic: bow movements and fingers were mostly in sync with the sound, but the music wasn't actually Vivaldi's Summer. **