Video models with lighter filters: what exists, and what fits our job
Research for the lead (meridian-lead), written 11:40 AM EDT, Friday 16 October 2026. Paper only: nothing was installed, downloaded or generated. Raw evidence is in notes.md and sources/ next to this file.
How claims are marked: fact seen on an official page, repo, licence or our own data · maker the creator's own claim or benchmark · user a user report (forum, blog, review, news) · our maths arithmetic from listed prices · single source only one source says it.
Short answer
Best local option
Wan 2.2 on mg2, in ComfyUI
Free for commercial use (Apache-2.0), no content filter in the weights, has the start-and-end-frame mode a morph needs and a character-reference add-on (VACE). Fits a 16 GB card using shrunk (GGUF) files. Makes about 5 s per pass; longer shots are chained.
Best hosted option
Kling 3.0 (paid plan)
Takes several character images ("Elements") plus a start and end frame, 3–15 s clips, 9:16, about $0.09–0.11 per second. Clearest commercial grant of the Chinese services; data held in Singapore. US runner-up with no China question: Runway Gen-4.5 at $0.12/s.
Rule out
MiniMax H3, Veo anywhere, Sora
H3 (the newest, least-filtered open model) is not licensed for use in the US. Veo carries Google's filter to every reseller. OpenAI shut Sora down (app April, API September 2026).
The legal frame, stated once
A model with lighter filters does not change trademark or copyright law. Google's refusal is a signal the client's trademark check has to answer. If the character reads as someone else's, that problem follows the footage onto every platform. Every service below, local or hosted, makes the user promise they hold the rights to what they upload or generate, and the open-weight licences forbid infringing anyone's IP too. What we want on file before any public use: the client's written statement that they own the character, plus the finished trademark/likeness check.
This report covers what tools exist. It does not cover how to get past any filter, and none of the research looked at that.
Why Google Flow refused the character
- fact At 11:01 AM EDT on 16 Oct, Flow's Ingredients mode refused shot 10, which used three images of the client's character: "I can't generate the video you requested right now due to interests of third-party content providers." No charge. The prompt named no character, brand or drug; Frames-to-Video with background-only plates worked. (Client folder
flow_log.md;data/research/google-flow/FLOW-BRIDGE-RECEIPT.md.) - fact Google's Veo safety documentation lists a filter category called "Third-party content" ("Guardrails related to third-party content"), alongside "Child" and "Celebrity" categories. Vertex AI video guidelines. Our wording fits it: an automated check judged the images too close to someone else's protected work. It is not a human ruling that the art infringes anything.
- user Disney sent Google a cease-and-desist letter in December 2025 naming Veo and Gemini (TheWrap, Cartoon Brew); Google tightened afterwards.
- The filter travels with the model. Veo 3.1 and Gemini Omni run on Google's side even when sold through Runway, Luma, Pika, Adobe, Krea, Magnific or fal, so expect the same refusal there. Change the model, not the website. (Our inference, not tested.)
- A second possible trigger: chibi proportions (big head, small body) could read as a child. Veo has a "Child" category fact, and Adobe staff say Firefly image-to-video won't animate keyframes it believes show children user (Adobe Community). Our refusal text points to the third-party filter, but watch for this on any service.
Run it ourselves: open-weight models
Our machines fact (read 11:40 AM EDT): system76 has an RTX 4070 SUPER 12 GB and 31 GB RAM; mg1 and mg2 each have an RTX 3080 Laptop 16 GB and 62 GB RAM. Nearly every working 12–16 GB report on Reddit pairs the card with 48–64 GB RAM for offloading, so mg2 (16 GB card, 62 GB RAM, mostly free) is our best local box; system76's 31 GB RAM is the tighter limit there.
Filters: none of the open-weight repos read ship a content filter in the weights or inference code fact (README check). So Flow's IP check simply does not exist locally. The licence decides whether we may use a model at all.
| Model (current open version) | Licence: commercial use in the US? | Morph (start + end frame) / character reference | Length, 9:16 | system76 12 GB | mg1/mg2 16 GB | ComfyUI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wan 2.2 (Alibaba), Jul 2025; Animate-2 Aug 2026. Wan 2.5–3.0 are API-only. | Yes, Apache-2.0: "We claim no rights over the your generated contents" fact | Yes / yes, via VACE reference-to-video and Animate fact | ≈5 s (81 frames at 16 fps); 720×1280 portrait supported fact | 5B model yes; 14B at Q4 GGUF (9.65 GB per expert file) with offload, 480p realistic | 14B at Q5/Q6 GGUF (10.8–12.0 GB per expert) | Native templates incl. start+end frame and VACE reference fact |
| HunyuanVideo 1.5 (Tencent), Nov 2025, 8.3B | Yes. Territory excludes only the EU, UK and South Korea fact | No / no (text and image to video only) | ≈5 s at 24 fps; aspect settable | fp8/GGUF | Official minimum 14 GB with offload maker | Native |
| LTX-2.5 (Lightricks), Jul–Aug 2026, 22B, makes audio | Yes if annual revenue is under $10M; above that a paid licence fact | Yes (keyframes) / "Ingredients" reference-sheet add-on | 121 frames at 24 fps, chunked longer; native 1080×1920 portrait since 2.3 maker | Hard: ~7 min a clip, 45 GB RAM user single source | GGUF Q3/Q4 + offload; borderline | Native |
| SkyReels-V3 (Skywork), Jan 2026, 14B | Yes, worldwide; PRC law governs fact | — / yes, 1–4 character images | 5 s at 720p | Unlikely | "under 24 GB" low-VRAM mode; 16 GB untested | Kijai wrapper (V2) |
| Kandinsky 6.0 Video, 6 Oct 2026, 3B / 29B | Yes, MIT | No / no | 5 s only | 3B probably | Both run on 16 GB cards maker | Custom node |
| MiniMax H3, 2 Aug 2026, 33B | NO. The US is an "Excluded Territory"; outputs may not be used there fact | Yes / yes | 4–15 s, 9:16 | Runs on 12 GB (608×352 in 167 s on a 4070) user, but not ours to use | Native | |
| LongCat-Video, Helios, MAGI-1, Open-Sora 2.0, Mochi, CogVideoX 1.5 | Mostly yes (MIT/Apache; CogVideoX needs free registration) | Older, weaker or text-only for our purpose; Step-Video and MAGI-2 need datacentre GPUs; Apple STARFlow-V is research-only; Krea Realtime's licence contradicts itself; Krea 2 is an image model. | ||||
The MiniMax H3 trap
H3 is the model Reddit and Hacker News are most excited about: "Least-censored model of any type I've ever seen from a major lab" user (HN), and users prompt famous cartoon characters with no refusal user (r/comfyui). But its licence reads fact: "'Excluded Territories' means the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States of America", and "You may not use … the MiniMax H3 Works or any of their Outputs … outside the Applicable Territory" (licence). That also covers apps built on it (WanGP's H3 support, the H3 ComfyUI node packs). Not usable by us without a separate licence from MiniMax.
Speed on cards like ours user
- Wan 2.2 vs LTX-2 on a 5060 Ti 16 GB: "~200 secs vs 250 secs for WAN at 4 steps"; "only 1 out of 5-6 videos generated on LTX-2 is usable vs 1 out of 2-3 for WAN 2.2" (r/StableDiffusion) single source.
- Wan 2.2 image-to-video 4-step workflows run on an RTX 5070 12 GB with 32 GB RAM (r/comfyui).
- LTX-2.3 fp8 on a 4070 Ti 12 GB: "5 mins for 15s @ 1024x640" (r/StableDiffusion); on a 3070 8 GB, 900×1600 for 20 s took 21 min (r/comfyui). A 3060 12 GB owner found LTX-2.3 "10x worse than wan2.2" for them.
- A 3080 Laptop is slower than a desktop 4070 Ti, so plan on several minutes per 5-second take at 480–720p and an evening per finished shot set. No source benchmarks our exact cards.
How the community keeps a 3D character consistent locally user
- Start every shot from a still of the character (image-to-video), or feed the character sheet to VACE / reference-to-video.
- Train a small character add-on (a LoRA) on the client's own renders: a former 3D animator did this to keep "the soul of the 3D character" (4,618 upvotes).
- Drive layout and camera from a Blender blockout or depth pass (LTX-2.3 IC-LoRA example).
- For 12-second shots, chain 5-second passes: the last frame of one becomes the first frame of the next. Do the morph as its own start-to-end-frame shot.
Hosted Chinese services
| Service (model) | Character images / start + end frame | Length, 9:16 | Approx. $ per second | Commercial use | Trains on our uploads? | Law; data location |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kling (Kuaishou), 3.0 / 3.0 Omni, Feb 2026. 4.0 announced 30 Sep, early access only. | Yes, "Elements" / yes fact (fal model page) | 3–15 s; 9:16 yes user | ~$0.09 app 720p our maths; $0.112 on fal (Pro, no audio) fact; API yes | Paid members only; free output must show Kling branding fact (terms 10 Oct 2026) | Yes, the terms allow training on your input (4.7.3) | Singapore law; Singapore servers |
| Wan 3.0 on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, Aug 2026 | Reference / yes, first-last-frame variant fact | Up to 30 s | $0.10 at 720p (Singapore); $0.0825 (US Virginia) fact | Output-ownership clause not found | "will never use your data for model training" fact | Singapore region data stays there. API only |
| Seedance (ByteDance) via Dreamina/CapCut: 2.0 (US since 7 Apr 2026), 2.5 (31 Jul 2026) | Up to 9 images (2.0), "50 references" (2.5) / yes | 15 s (2.0), 30 s (2.5); 9:16 yes | ~$0.035–0.097 for 2.5 on Dreamina plans (promo) fact; $0.30 for 2.0 on fal | Terms contradict themselves fact | Yes, no opt-out fact | California law; storage not stated. 2.5 availability in the US unclear |
| Vidu (ShengShu), Q4 Preview 7 Oct 2026 | Up to 15 images maker / yes | 16 s; 9:16 yes | From $0.014 (launch promo) maker; $0.10 for Q3 reference mode | Paid only | Perpetual licence incl. "artificial intelligence training" fact | Hong Kong law; "may be processed in … China" fact |
| Hailuo (MiniMax), H3 / Hailuo 3.0, Jul 2026 | Up to 9 images / yes, but not combined with references | 15 s; 9:16 yes | $0.08 at 768p, official API fact | Main terms: "personal, non-commercial use only"; paid-plan terms differ | Perpetual licence incl. right to "derive revenue" | Singapore law. Disney/Universal/WB copyright suit survived dismissal 22 May 2026 (Bloomberg Law) |
| PixVerse V6, Mar 2026 | Yes / yes fact | 15 s | ~$0.06 at 720p user single source | "non-commercial purposes unless you obtain separate authorization" | Aggregated; opt-out only where offered | Singapore law |
| Hunyuan / Yuanbao (Tencent) | China-focused app with no character-reference mode. Not a practical option; use HunyuanVideo 1.5 locally instead. | |||||
- IP filters on Chinese services are real and tightening. Seedance 2.0 drew cease-and-desist letters from Disney, Paramount and others plus the Motion Picture Association in February 2026, paused its global launch, then shipped "technology designed to block unauthorized generation of intellectual property" and a real-face block fact (CapCut newsroom). Seedance 2.5 adds a licensed route: "a new platform that will allow copyright owners to authorize AI creation and share profit" user (r/singularity).
- Kling: one creator reports "After hundreds of generations I have yet to get a content violation" user single source (r/aivideo); a third-party developer note says Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man are blocked user single source.
- No source anywhere reports an original stylised character being refused on a Chinese service, and none reports one passing. We have to test.
- Data: uploading the client's art to Kling, Vidu, Hailuo, PixVerse or Dreamina grants that company a licence to it, in most cases including model training. Alibaba's Wan API says it won't train on our data. Running locally sends nothing anywhere.
Other hosted services
| Service (model) | Image to video / character reference / start + end frame | Length, 9:16 | Approx. $ per second | IP indemnity for a normal paid user |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runway Gen-4.5 (Dec 2025); Aleph 2.0 editing (May 2026) | Yes / References + Act-Two performance transfer fact / not confirmed | ~10 s; 720×1280 user | $0.12 (Max plan or API) to $0.29 (Standard) our maths; API $0.12 fact | No; the user indemnifies Runway |
| Luma Ray3.2 (Jun 2026) | Yes / reference images on fal / up to 16 keyframes fact | 20 s at 1080p maker; 9:16 at generation not confirmed (Reframe tool can change ratio) | $0.06 (720p) / $0.24 (1080p) on Plus our maths | No |
| Pika 2.5 + Pikaframes | Yes / Pikaswaps / 2–5 keyframes user | 5–10 s | Not priced for 2.5; commercial use starts at the $35 plan | No |
| Higgsfield (aggregator: Kling 3.0, Seedance 2.5, Wan 3.0, Veo 3.1, own models) | Per model; Soul ID character tool | Per model | Kling 3.0 ~$0.08–0.14 our maths | Enterprise only |
| Adobe Firefly Video Model | Yes / none / no last frame | 5 s; 9:16 yes fact | ~$0.10 our maths | Enterprise only, Firefly model only; partner models not covered |
| Midjourney video | Yes / start image / end image | 5 s, extend to ~21 s; 480p or 720p | ~$0.02–0.09 our maths; no API | No |
| Moonvalley Marey (licensed training data) | Yes / — / — | 5 or 10 s | $0.30 on fal fact | No; built for realism |
| OpenAI Sora 2 | Shut down: app 26 Apr 2026, API 24 Sep 2026. Its Dec 2025 Disney deal (licensed characters) ended with it. HN thread "Goodbye to Sora", 1,142 points (HN). | |||
| Veo 3.1 / Gemini Omni anywhere | Same model, same "Third-party content" filter, whichever site sells it. Google indemnifies Veo only on the paid Vertex API, not Flow fact. | |||
What people actually say
Reddit 400 top posts, past year
- Seedance dominates hosted-video posts. "Seedance 4K is insanely expensive, this was $6,000 worth of credits" (4,584 upvotes); "Japanese animator using Seedance to render anime from simple 3D models" (2,829), by an animator credited on TRIGUN STAMPEDE. A 3D blockout turned into a stylised render is close to our job.
- Locally it's Wan 2.2 and LTX-2.x, and since August, MiniMax H3. Top threads: Time-to-Move + Wan 2.2 (6,086), LTX-2 image-to-video on 16 GB (2,575), Wan 2.2 infinite-length chaining (2,186), "I love LTX2.3" (1,648), H3 Turbo LoRA (1,638), LTX-2.5 release (999).
- Filters, as users see them: "WAN can do suggestive scenes from the box, LTX-2 have censorship"; LTX trains on licensed data. H3 "pretty much uncensored"; "PSA: Minimax H3 is forbidden to use in US, EU, UK, and South Korea" (r/LocalLLaMA), and MiniMax has since cracked down on third-party H3 add-ons.
- Many "censorship" threads are about removing safety training from chat models. That is out of scope and was not used.
Hacker News
- "Goodbye to Sora" (Mar 2026, 1,142 points): "It was legitimately fun until the IP guardrails came up" user.
- "MiniMax H3 Day-0 Support in ComfyUI: Open Weights" (Aug 2026, 334 points): "running this on my 4070ti super (16 gb vram), and it takes 10 minutes for a 10-seconds 480p video" user single source; others found 1080p "unusable" and prompts ignored.
- "Seedance 2.5" (Aug 2026, 442 points): "really good at using those reference images"; "No weights, no care"; "Apparently Seedance has a version without guardrails if you are a licensed production company" user single source, unverified.
GitHub fact (read 11:25 AM EDT)
| Repo | Stars | Last push | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Comfy-Org/ComfyUI | 137,874 | 16 Oct 2026 | Runs everything below |
| Wan-Video/Wan2.2 | 17,965 | 21 Sep 2026 | Apache-2.0, active |
| Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanVideo | 12,628 | 8 Oct 2026 | 1.5 repo: 4,571 stars |
| deepbeepmeep/WanGP | 10,565 | 16 Oct 2026 | "for the GPU poor": low-VRAM runner, free inside a company |
| Lightricks/LTX-2 | 9,765 | 13 Oct 2026 | Licence file updated 13 Oct |
| kijai/ComfyUI-WanVideoWrapper | 6,735 | 24 May 2026 | The community's Wan toolbox |
| city96/ComfyUI-GGUF | 4,170 | 12 Jan 2026 | Loads the shrunk model files |
| ali-vilab/VACE | 3,976 | 17 Oct 2025 | Character reference for Wan |
| SkyworkAI/SkyReels-V3 | 581 | 30 Jan 2026 | Reference-to-video, 1–4 images |
Character-consistent image-to-video workflows don't live in starred GitHub repos (top search hit: 14 stars). They ship as ComfyUI's built-in templates and Kijai's example workflows.
Recommendation for this job
The job: a stylised 3D chibi character from client art, 9:16, 4–12 s shots, including a morph.
1Local: Wan 2.2 14B in ComfyUI on mg2
- Image-to-video from client stills for most shots; the start-and-end-frame template for the morph; VACE reference-to-video if the character drifts.
- GGUF Q5/Q6 files on the 16 GB card, 480p first, then 720×1280 for keepers; chain 5-second passes for longer shots.
- Why: free for commercial use, no filter, morph and reference modes built in, the client's art never leaves our machines, and it's the community's most reliable model (1 in 2–3 takes usable, per one user).
- Runners-up: HunyuanVideo 1.5 for plain image-to-video shots on 16 GB; LTX-2.5 if our entity is under $10M revenue and we want native 1080×1920 and audio (heavy on our cards).
- Cost: $0 beyond electricity and GPU time. mg2 also hosts the prediction-market recorders and the Flow Chrome lane, so check the GPU is free before a long run.
2Hosted: Kling 3.0 on a paid plan
- Elements for the character, start + end frame for the morph (as separate requests: Kling can't combine both in one), 3–15 s, 9:16.
- About 12 shots × 8 s = 96 finished seconds; at roughly 3 takes each that's ~290 generated seconds, or about $26–33 at $0.09–0.112/s our maths.
- Watch: paid plan required for commercial use; Kling's terms allow training on our uploads, so the client should agree to that; data held in Singapore.
- If a US company is preferred: Runway Gen-4.5 ($0.12/s, strong character consistency per reviewers, Act-Two can transfer a recorded performance) with Luma Ray3.2 keyframes for the morph. Same rough budget: about $35 on Runway.
- Not recommended for this client: Seedance/Dreamina (trains on uploads with no opt-out, the heaviest IP filter, muddled commercial terms, though it has the best quality); Hailuo (active Disney suit, non-commercial main terms); Vidu (training licence, may process data in China); PixVerse (non-commercial by default).
Suggested next test (needs the lead's say-so)
- Client confirms in writing that they own the character, and the trademark check moves forward. Google's refusal is evidence for that check.
- Local bake-off on mg2: one 480p Wan 2.2 image-to-video take and one start-to-end-frame morph from the client's stills. No upload, no cost.
- One cheap hosted draft each on Kling 3.0 and Runway Gen-4.5 with the same still. Same refusal rule as Flow: one refusal ends that shot with no rephrasing, and a second refusal stops all generating.
- If both hosted services also refuse, that's strong evidence the design itself reads as someone else's character. Take it back to the client before going further on any tool.
Gaps and limits
- No source tested a glossy-black stylised 3D character on any of these models. Only a bake-off answers the quality question.
- No benchmarks exist for the RTX 3080 Laptop or 4070 SUPER specifically; speeds above come from nearby cards.
- Kling's own pricing page didn't load for the researcher; app prices are computed from credit rates. Seedance 2.5's availability to US accounts is unclear. Runway's last-frame support for Gen-4.5 is unconfirmed.
- X (via the grok CLI) was optional and not used. Reddit's r/Hailuo_AI returned "not found".
- Terms change often. Quotes were read on 16 Oct 2026; re-read before signing up.
Sources: notes.md (Flow refusal, GitHub, Hacker News and Reddit evidence); sources/web/open-weight-models.md, hosted-chinese.md, hosted-western.md, minimax-h3-license-verified.md (per-model detail with every link); sources/reddit/posts.json, sources/hn/*.json, sources/github/*.json (raw pulls). Tools: PRAW app-only, the Hacker News Algolia API, read-only gh api, web search and fetch. No browser lanes, installs, weights or paid APIs.