KennethFal/vh5tape-vhs-lora-minimax-h3
vh5tape — a worn-VHS look for MiniMax H3
A style LoRA that makes H3 footage look like it was recorded off 1980s broadcast television onto a VHS tape that has seen better days — soft smeared detail, chroma bleed, tracking noise, head-switching bands at the frame edge, and (because H3 trains audio jointly) the matching muffled mono sound, tape hiss and warble.
The damage is a prompt-controlled dial with three trained levels, from a gentle analog glow to a tape the VCR can barely hold onto.
<video controls playsinline width="720" src="https://huggingface.co/KennethFal/vh5tape-vhs-lora-minimax-h3/resolve/main/samples/vh5-trailer.mp4"></video>
Gallery
All clips are raw single takes at 480P / 4:3 — none of this content was in the training data.
<table> <tr> <td><video controls muted loop playsinline width="350" src="https://huggingface.co/KennethFal/vh5tape-vhs-lora-minimax-h3/resolve/main/samples/cartoon-robot.mp4"></video></td> <td><video controls muted loop playsinline width="350" src="https://huggingface.co/KennethFal/vh5tape-vhs-lora-minimax-h3/resolve/main/samples/news-anchor.mp4"></video></td> </tr> <tr> <td><video controls muted loop playsinline width="350" src="https://huggingface.co/KennethFal/vh5tape-vhs-lora-minimax-h3/resolve/main/samples/game-arcade.mp4"></video></td> <td><video controls muted loop playsinline width="350" src="https://huggingface.co/KennethFal/vh5tape-vhs-lora-minimax-h3/resolve/main/samples/movie-horror.mp4"></video></td> </tr> <tr> <td><video controls muted loop playsinline width="350" src="https://huggingface.co/KennethFal/vh5tape-vhs-lora-minimax-h3/resolve/main/samples/commercial-toy.mp4"></video></td> <td><video controls muted loop playsinline width="350" src="https://huggingface.co/KennethFal/vh5tape-vhs-lora-minimax-h3/resolve/main/samples/musicvideo.mp4"></video></td> </tr> </table>
Prompting
Prompt the way the model was trained: trigger first, damage tier second, scene third.
vh5tape, badly damaged VHS tape with heavy tracking errors and distortion. A loud
1980s local used car commercial: a salesman in a plaid suit shouts at a car lot
with strings of pennant flags and a spinning price sign, cheesy synthesizer
jingle, echoing announcer voice.The damage dial
Tips
- Trigger:
vh5tape— put it at the very start of the prompt. - Prompt expansion: the LoRA was trained through H3's caption format, and the
balancedexpansion mode preserves the trigger and damage phrases — safe to keep on. - Scale:
1.0for the full look;0.7–0.9softens the wear if heavy prompts overshoot; up to~1.5pushes toward barely-watchable tape (fun for horror). - Sound comes along for free: describe the audio ("muffled mono audio", "canned laughter", "cheesy jingle") and it renders appropriately tape-worn.
- Dialogue: give characters short explicit quoted lines (
the host says: "It slices, it dices!") — they come through near-verbatim. - Period set dressing helps: wood paneling, studio lighting, 4:3, era wardrobe.
Recipe (fal)
Works on the H3 and H3-Max LoRA endpoints (minimax/h3/text-to-video/lora, minimax/h3-max/text-to-video/lora) and their image-to-video LoRA siblings:
{
"prompt": "vh5tape, worn VHS tape recording with visible tape damage. A 1980s ...",
"loras": [{ "path": "<url to vh5tape.safetensors>", "scale": 1.0 }],
"resolution": "480P",
"aspect_ratio": "4:3",
"duration": 15,
"prompt_expansion_mode": "balanced"
}480P / 4:3 is the period-correct sweet spot; the style carries fine to higher resolutions if you want clean pixels of a dirty tape.
ComfyUI
vh5tape.safetensors loads in ComfyUI as-is — no conversion needed. It uses the ComfyUI-native key layout (diffusion_model.blocks.N.attn.{qkv_proj,out_proj}, fused QKV, alpha = rank), so all 104 modules load with no warnings.
Base checkpoint — this is the thing that matters. Use a non-pruned, non-rotated base:
- ✅
minimax_h3_fl2va_bf16.safetensors(recommended) - ✅
minimax_h3_fl2va_pruned_fp8_scaled.safetensors - ❌
*_int8_convrot,nvfp4,w4a8— these store weights in a rotated / quantized basis. The LoRA loads without any error and then produces warped faces, melting limbs and disappearing objects. The default checkpoint in the official ComfyUI H3 tutorial is `minimax_h3_fl2va_pruned_int8_convrot` — you must change it. (Not specific to this LoRA — MiniMax-H3 LoRAs in general are made for fp16/fp8 bases.)
Setup
- Put
vh5tape.safetensorsinComfyUI/models/loras/. UNETLoader(bf16 or fp8_scaled fl2va) →LoraLoaderModelOnly→MiniMaxH3ImageToVideo/ your sampler.- Strength 1.0 (useful range 0.7–1.2).
Sampling recipe — H3 is CFG-distilled, so SDXL/Flux habits will degrade it with or without a LoRA: use BasicGuider (not CFGGuider), res_multistep + simple, ~20 steps, video shift 12 / audio shift 3 (the MiniMax H3 Sigma Shift node). Stay near 1 MP (very low resolutions are unstable) and keep prompts to a single shot.
Stacking with a turbo LoRA: drop this one to 0.4–0.6 — the two perturbations add, and 4-step turbo has little headroom. (The turbo_mode checkbox occupies its own LoRA slot; add a second LoraLoaderModelOnly for this one.) 4-step turbo also softens the tape grain — ~20–25 full-precision steps show the style best.
If it looks wrong, two 2-minute checks: (1) watch the console at load — this LoRA should patch with zero "lora key not loaded" lines; (2) on a quantized base, load the LoRA at strength 0.0 and compare to no-LoRA — if output degrades even at 0.0, the damage is the quantize→merge→requantize round-trip on your base checkpoint, not this LoRA: switch to the bf16 base.
vh5tape-comfyui.safetensors is an optional convenience build: bit-identical weights plus explicit .alpha tensors (= rank, scale 1.0) and the base-model requirement in its metadata — same look, just harder to mis-load in third-party loaders.
Training
Trained with fal's MiniMax H3 t2v trainer (rank 32, 5,000 steps, 4:3, joint video+audio objective) on a small hand-curated set of four-second clips of period broadcast material — sitcoms, soap operas, commercials, news and station sign-offs — each captioned with its content and one of the three damage-tier phrases above. The 5,000-step checkpoint beat its 2k/3k/4k/6k siblings in blind A/B testing; more steps past 5k made the damage tamer, not heavier.
Get the weights
Made for H3-TV — a 1970s portable CRT being rebuilt to play an endless, slightly wrong 1980s broadcast day.
