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02
Examples
Real outputs from the public examples of this model on Replicate, with the prompt and settings that produced them. They were not generated live on this page.
Prompt
a woman is walking through a busy Tokyo street at night, she is wearing dark sunglasses
Length: 0:06
Prompt
an animated scene shows a dog running through long grass
Length: 0:06
Prompt
a resplendent quetzal is sitting in a tree
Length: 0:06
Example prompts
Examples from the Railwail catalog. They were not generated live on this page.
Food Animation
Length: 0:06
Close-up of chocolate being poured over a stack of fresh strawberries in slow motion, the chocolate coating each berry as it cascades down, warm studio lighting
Social Media Clip
Length: 0:04
A person walking confidently through a colorful mural-covered alley, camera tracking alongside them, vibrant graffiti art on both walls, casual street fashion, golden hour
03
About Minimax Video
TL;DRAs of 23 September 2026
Minimax Video is a model by MiniMax in the Video generation category. On Railwail, Minimax Video costs US$0.60 per video. Newer version: Hailuo 2.3.
Background
About MiniMax
Founded 2021 · Shanghai, China
MiniMax (Shanghai Xiyu Technology) was founded in December 2021 by Yan Junjie, former SenseTime general manager, alongside several senior researchers from SenseTime and Microsoft Research Asia. It is one of China's 'four AI tigers' along with Zhipu, Moonshot and Baichuan, and has raised over $1B from investors including Tencent, Alibaba, HongShan and Mihoyo, with a $2.5B+ valuation in 2024. MiniMax developed the abab LLM family and the Hailuo AI consumer chat product. The 'Minimax Video' product (a.k.a. Hailuo Video on the consumer surface) generates short cinematic clips and was, at launch in September 2024, one of the first Chinese video AIs widely available to international users. This entry covers the developer-facing MiniMax Video API which exposes the underlying Hailuo Video models to third-party platforms.
Latent video diffusion (Diffusion Transformer) family
MiniMax Video is the API-tier branding for the Hailuo Video model family (currently Video-01, Video-01-Live, Video-01-Subject, Hailuo 02 and Hailuo 2.3). All variants share a closed latent-video-diffusion architecture: a 3D VAE compresses video into a spatio-temporal latent grid, and a transformer-based denoiser is conditioned on bilingual Chinese/English text embeddings (from a MiniMax abab-family LLM encoder) plus optional image embeddings. Different variants emphasise different conditioning modalities: text-only (Video-01), live2D-style anime animation (Video-01-Live) and subject-reference / identity locking (Video-01-Subject). Generation produces 6-10 second clips at 720p-1080p / 24-30 fps. MiniMax publish no model card; behaviour and reported throughput suggest a multi-billion-parameter DiT trained on a curated multilingual video corpus with synthetic dense captions and reward-model post-training.
Parameters
Undisclosed
Capabilities
API-tier access to Hailuo Video family (Video-01, Live, Subject, Hailuo 02, 2.3)
Text-to-video and image-to-video
Subject-reference mode for locked character identity
Live2D-style stylised animation mode
6-10 second clips at 720p-1080p
Bilingual Chinese/English prompts
Director-style camera control vocabulary
Competitive pricing for high resolution
Best for: third-party creative platforms, anime/stylised animation, social shorts.
Training & license
Closed corpus of licensed and web video with bilingual dense captions; exact size undisclosed.
License: Proprietary commercial licence via MiniMax API and Hailuo AI platform terms.
Safety testing: NSFW, CSAM, public-figure and politically sensitive content filters in line with CAC rules; stricter moderation on Chinese surfaces.
Known limitations
6-10 second clip limit
No native audio
Heavy political and public-figure moderation
Less English prompt-following precision than Veo / Sora 2
curl https://railwail.com/api/v1/videos/generations \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $RAILWAIL_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "minimax-video",
"prompt": "A slow drone shot over a misty pine forest at sunrise"
}'
# Response: {"job_id": "...", "status": "queued", ...}
# Poll until status is completed, failed or cancelled:
curl https://railwail.com/api/v1/jobs/JOB_ID \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $RAILWAIL_API_KEY"
import os
import time
import requests
API = "https://railwail.com/api/v1"
headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['RAILWAIL_API_KEY']}"}
job = requests.post(
f"{API}/videos/generations",
headers=headers,
json={
"model": "minimax-video",
"prompt": "A slow drone shot over a misty pine forest at sunrise",
},
).json()
while True:
status = requests.get(f"{API}/jobs/{job['job_id']}", headers=headers).json()
if status["status"] in ("completed", "failed", "cancelled"):
break
time.sleep(5)
print(status["status"], status.get("output_url"))
const API = "https://railwail.com/api/v1";
const headers = {
Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.RAILWAIL_API_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json",
};
const job = await fetch(`${API}/videos/generations`, {
method: "POST",
headers,
body: JSON.stringify({
model: "minimax-video",
prompt: "A slow drone shot over a misty pine forest at sunrise"
}),
}).then((r) => r.json());
let status;
do {
await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, 5000));
status = await fetch(`${API}/jobs/${job.job_id}`, { headers }).then((r) => r.json());
} while (!["completed", "failed", "cancelled"].includes(status.status));
console.log(status.status, status.output_url);
Minimax Video is a model by MiniMax in the Video generation category. On Railwail you can call it with an API key through the Railwail API.
How much does Minimax Video cost on Railwail?
On Railwail, Minimax Video costs US$0.60 per video. The price is known before the run starts. Usage is paid from prepaid credits; 1 credit equals US$0.01.
Which settings does Minimax Video support?
According to its input schema, Minimax Video knows these parameters: prompt and start_image.
How fast is Minimax Video?
There are not enough measured runs of Minimax Video on Railwail yet to state a run time. It depends on the input, the settings and the load at the provider.
Is Minimax Video better than Hailuo 2.3?
That depends on the task. Minimax Video (MiniMax) and Hailuo 2.3 (MiniMax) are both models in the Video generation category. The comparison page shows their prices and specifications side by side.
Create a Railwail API key and send your request with the model ID minimax-video. Code examples for curl, Python and JavaScript are in the API section of this page.
MiniMax Hailuo 02 on Replicate. Text-to-video and image-to-video producing 6s or 10s clips at 768p standard or 1080p pro. Known for accurate real-world physics and stable motion.
