Pika-Labs/Pika-H3-Flex

Pika H3 Flex

Built for professional iteration.

Six-step generation · Omni-reference · Native 480p / 768p · Up to 4K via Pika API

Model weights · Watch samples · Quickstart · Prompt guide · Pika API extensions

Pika H3 Flex is a post-trained H3 model, designed to give professional creators the flexibility and speed to explore with precision. Optimized for greater control, it generates video with synchronized audio in six sampling steps and supports up to 12 reference inputs, with shot direction through references and prompts.

Pika’s hosted API extends this workflow with 1080p, 2K and 4K video generation, audio stems and prompt enhancement. Local open-weight inference supports native 480p / 768p video with mixed stereo audio.

Ideal for multi-shot storytelling · Motion graphics · Product films · Reference-guided animation

Watch the model

Explore camera choreography, cinematic storytelling, graphic design and reference-guided animation. Play a clip with sound; expand its prompt for the generation description.

Prompt

Image 1 is the exact two players, outfits, frog mask, table-tennis table and drained pool: keep them exactly as in Image 1. A fast table-tennis rally, shot with exactly these camera moves: 00:00–00:03 — top-down from directly overhead, as in Image 1, as the rally begins and the ball flicks back and forth. 00:03–00:06 — a smooth crane straight down from overhead to table height, ending right beside the net as the ball zips across. 00:06–00:09 — fast whip pans left and right following the ball across the net, from one player to the other. 00:09–00:12 — a 180-degree orbit around the frog-masked player as she leaps and smashes the ball. 00:12–00:15 — a low-angle dolly backward along the pool floor as the woman in the red tracksuit dives and misses; the frog raises both arms and does a little victory dance; the camera settles and holds. The players, table and pool stay consistent and in the same place throughout. Photoreal 35mm film look, true colour, light natural grain, matching Image 1. SPEED IS CRITICAL: everything moves at normal real-time speed, like 24fps footage played back at 24fps - natural motion, NO slow motion. Sound: the quick tock-tock of the ball, sneakers squeaking on concrete, the smash, a thud as she dives, echo in the empty pool, the frog's muffled cheer. Music: a funky, upbeat drum-and-bass groove.

Prompt

A tall white modernist apartment tower against a soft pale-blue sky with faint streaky cirrus cloud. The building sits on the right half of the frame; the left half is open sky. Smooth off-white render facade with small square windows in thick white frames. Three identical cantilevered concrete balconies are stacked vertically on the building's corner, each a thick white slab with an angled, wedge-shaped underside and a thin white metal railing of vertical balusters. Crisp, graphic, minimal, soft 1970s film palette: chalky whites, powder blue, muted pastels. Three people are doing a slow, calm morning stretch routine, one per balcony. They are always gently in motion, never frozen, but every movement is slow, smooth and controlled, like yoga or tai chi: each stretch takes three to four seconds to flow into, eases gently at the end, and flows unhurried into the next. No fast, jerky, snapping or flailing movements. Graceful, deliberate, meditative. Top balcony: a young woman with dark hair pulled back, in a lilac fluffy knit jumper and matching lilac wide-leg knit trousers. She slowly reaches both arms high overhead, then gradually leans her upper body into a long side bend to the left, eases back to centre, and slowly leans to the right. Middle balcony: a man with short dark hair in a rust-red tracksuit. He hangs in a deep forward fold with palms on the floor, then slowly rolls up through his spine to standing, and lifts his arms in one wide, slow circle overhead. Bottom balcony: an older woman with short silver-grey hair in a cobalt blue short-sleeved polo and loose cream trousers. She holds a wide warrior lunge with arms stretched out to each side, slowly shifts her weight from one bent knee to the other, and gently sweeps one arm up and over her head into a side bend. Each person moves at their own unhurried rhythm, slightly out of sync with each other, with full-body range of motion: knitwear and trousers stretching and settling, real balance and weight. Camera, one continuous shot with no cuts: 0-3s: Wide establishing frame. The camera begins a slow, smooth orbit around the corner of the tower, arcing about 40 degrees, with strong parallax between the balconies, building face and sky. 3-5s: Still moving, the camera pushes in hard on the middle balcony until the man in the red tracksuit fills the frame alone, waist-up, mid-stretch, railing in the foreground. 5-7s: A steady vertical boom up the face of the building, past the concrete underside of the slab above, revealing the lilac woman mid-side-bend. 7-10s: A fast, controlled boom straight down past the middle balcony to the bottom one, revealing the older woman shifting through her lunge. 10-13s: Smooth pull back and reverse orbit, landing on the opening wide composition, all three still actively stretching. Soft diffused daylight, gentle soft shadows under each slab, no hard sun. 35mm film look with fine grain. Stabilized crane/drone motion, never jittery. Sound: natural diegetic location sound only — light wind gusting past the building, distant city hum, faint birds, soft fabric rustle. No music, no score, no singing, no melody, no rhythm track. No speech, no voices, no talking, no dialogue, no murmuring, no vocal sounds of any kind.

Prompt

A 1990s American multi-camera sitcom scene exactly like Image 1: bright, flat studio lighting on a living-room set, slight videotape softness, the same woman in red. A live studio audience laughs throughout. Hard cuts between different camera angles. [Shot 1] 0-3 s: wide shot. She carries a pretty birthday cake into the living room and sets it on the coffee table; a small dog in a party hat sits by the sofa, staring at the cake. (Audience: "Aww.") [Shot 2] 3-5 s: medium shot. A sudden knock at the door. She points at the dog: "Wait here. Don't touch it." and walks out of frame to answer the door. [Shot 3] 5-9 s: close-up, locked on the coffee table: the dog jumps up and wolfs down the cake, cream flying, party hat askew, tail wagging wildly. (Audience bursts out laughing.) [Shot 4] 9-12 s: wide shot. She comes back and freezes: only a small piece of cake is left, the dog has cream all over its face and sits back down as if nothing happened, licking its lips. She throws her hands up, baffled: "…What happened?!" [Shot 5] 12-15 s: close-up. The dog lets out a creamy little burp and tilts its head at her. She looks at the camera and sighs. (Big laugh and applause, sitcom transition music.) Sound: studio audience laughter and applause, a knock, the dog gobbling and a tiny burp, an upbeat 90s sitcom theme. Only these two lines. No subtitles or other text.

Prompt

A bold full-bleed motion graphic, NO frame, NO border, NO paper edges — the design fills the whole 16:9 screen. Flat Swiss/geometric style, exact colours and shapes of Image 1, crisp edges. BIG motion, never static, beat-synced to a punchy 120 BPM track. 0-3 s: the screen starts as one flat colour; geometric blocks slam in from all four sides on each beat, building the layout of Image 1. 3-7 s: circles roll across, triangles flip, stripes slide; a figure made of shapes runs through the composition, each step stamping a new colour block. 7-10 s: the letters of MOVE drop in one by one with heavy squash-and-stretch, then hold perfectly still; spell it exactly. 10-13 s: everything except MOVE explodes outward and snaps back on the beat, rearranged into a new layout. 13-15 s: fast camera push-in and a 15-degree rotation into the O of MOVE, ending on a solid colour. Sound: punchy electronic beat with a hit on every shape. No other text.

Prompt

A 15-second fast-cut, high-energy cinematic product commercial for the cobalt-blue over-ear headphones from reference image 1 (exact same shape, colour, mesh headband, knit cushions and metal hinges, no logos) about deep bass. Edited like a premium tech launch film: rapid hard cuts on the beat, every shot a bold, different cinematic angle and lens. The film is about the HEADPHONES. NO glass, NO water, NO plants, NO other props. The whole film stays on a clean seamless powder-blue studio set; the background is always clean powder blue, never a wall edge or dark studio. SHOT 1 (0-2.5s): OPENS on exactly the composition of reference image 1 — same framing and angle, the cobalt headphones holding the ripe peach between their ear cups on powder blue. The peach stays perfectly still and seated in place — it does NOT jump, bounce or move position — it only PULSES: its surface subtly swells and contracts like a heartbeat in time with each deep bass hit, the ear cups gently tightening with it. Slow push-in. SHOT 2 (2.5-4s): Hard cut on the beat, the peach is gone for the rest of the film: snap-zoom extreme macro across the cobalt headband mesh, the fabric trembling with the bass. SHOT 3 (4-5.5s): Extreme low worm's-eye angle, wide lens, looking up at the empty headphones towering against powder blue, fast dolly-in. SHOT 4 (5.5-7s): Top-down overhead shot spinning slowly, the headphones laid open in a perfect graphic shape on powder blue. SHOT 5 (7-8.5s): Dutch-angle macro sliding along the polished metal hinge and telescoping arm, light streaking across the metal. SHOT 6 (8.5-10s): Rack focus from the soft knit ear cushion in the foreground to the second ear cup behind, shallow depth of field. SHOT 7 (10-12s): Fast whip-pan into a low tracking shot as the headphones glide across the powder-blue floor toward camera, heavy motion blur, on the drop. SHOT 8 (12-13.5s): Profile silhouette-style side angle, soft edge light outlining the curve of the headband, slow-motion. SHOT 9 (13.5-15s): Crane down to the final hero shot of the empty headphones alone, three-quarter angle on powder blue, held on the last beat. SOUND: a deep sub-bass heartbeat pulse building into a punchy, stylish minimal electronic track with hard hits on every cut and a big drop. LOOK: high-end cinematic beauty/tech commercial, editorial and refined, Jacquemus / Loewe campaign energy. Soft pale true-colour grounds against deep saturated hero colours, large soft diffused light, shadows soft but present, low-to-moderate contrast, creamy highlights, subtle 35mm film grain, shallow depth of field, anamorphic feel. CAMERA is always moving with bold confident motion — dollies, macro orbits, crane moves, motion blur on fast moves — never static. Product always tack-sharp and recognisable. Hard cuts between shots, each shot a different angle and scale, one clear story from start to end. Correct real-world physics. NO text, NO titles, NO captions, NO logos, NO subtitles anywhere. Audio: no voiceover, no dialogue, only a polished commercial soundtrack plus crisp tactile sound design.

Prompt

References: @Image1 is the character sheet (front, three-quarter and back views of ONE character). @Image2 is the environment. @Video1 is the motion reference only. Make a new video of the character from @Image1, inside the environment from @Image2, performing exactly the body motion, choreography, timing and camera movement of the person in @Video1. Take NOTHING else from @Video1 - not the person's face, body, clothes, props, location, background, colours or photographic look. Keep the character exactly as designed in @Image1 - same face, proportions, outfit, colours - and render the whole video in the exact art style of @Image1 and @Image2, never photoreal. Only ONE character in frame. Style: vintage pop-art fashion illustration with black ink outlines, flat colour blocks, halftone and risograph grain, exactly as @Image1 and @Image2. Desmond dances on the terracotta checkerboard floor of his record shop from @Image2: the same whirling spins, flung arms and kicks as in @Video1, his mustard suit jacket flaring with each turn. Where the person in @Video1 holds the potted fern overhead, Desmond holds his vinyl record high above his head like a dance partner. He ends with arms wide and a little deadpan bow. Audio: an original upbeat 1960s-style soul groove playing from the turntable, loafers tapping and squeaking on the floor, a soft record-crackle. Normal real-time speed, NO slow motion. No text, no captions, no logos.

Prompts and input assets · Showcase metadata

These are creative showcases, not release-validation renders or throughput benchmarks. Exact reproduction with the released package is not guaranteed.

System overview

Pika H3 Flex is one video-and-audio model family with two task adapters: FL2VA for text and endpoint-frame conditioning, and Ref2VA for multimodal references. It builds on MiniMax-H3 and generates video with synchronized stereo audio in six sampling steps.

The inference pipeline encodes the prompt and input media, generates video and audio latents with the selected Pika H3 Flex adapter, then decodes and combines them into an MP4. The package downloads the pinned base components and adapter automatically. Use the prompt guide to describe scenes, motion, dialogue, ambience and music; optional prompt enhancement is available through the Pika API.

Input and output specifications

Category	Specification
Input modalities	Text; first/last images; image, video and audio references, depending on the selected mode
Native output resolution	480p / 768p across all 11 supported aspect ratios; exact pixel dimensions follow the selected aspect-ratio bucket
Output duration	Requested integer durations of 5–15 seconds; actual length follows the model frame grid
Output aspect ratios	21:9, 16:9, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 1:1, 4:5, 3:4, 2:3, 9:16, 9:21; dimensions use the packaged resolution buckets
Output frame rate	24 fps
Output audio	32 kHz stereo, mixed into the generated video
Output files	MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio, plus JSON generation metadata
Prompt input	Text or a UTF-8 prompt file; 1–8,000 characters
Sampling	Six generator evaluations using the released adapter's sampling schedule

Durations are rounded up to the supported frame grid: a 5-second request produces 124 frames (about 5.17 seconds), and a 15-second request produces 362 frames (about 15.08 seconds). Native resolution and aspect ratio jointly determine the actual canvas dimensions.

Generation modes and reference limits

Mode	Inputs	Adapter / CLI task
Text to video and audio	Prompt, without input media	FL2VA / t2va
First-frame conditioning	Prompt and one opening frame	FL2VA / i2va
Last-frame conditioning	Prompt and one ending frame	FL2VA / l2va
First-and-last-frame conditioning	Prompt and both endpoint frames	FL2VA / fl2va
Multimodal references	Prompt and ordered image/video references, optionally with audio references	Ref2VA / ref2va

Ref2VA accepts up to 9 images, 3 videos and 3 standalone audio clips, with 12 reference files total. At least one image or video is required. Each video or standalone audio clip must be 2–15 seconds; combined video duration and combined standalone-audio duration must each be at most 15 seconds. A video's embedded soundtrack stays with that video and does not count as an additional standalone audio file.

These are accepted input limits, not a guarantee that every maximum-size combination fits GPU memory. The package runs one request on one GPU, with optional CPU offload. See hardware requirements and tested configurations for representative H100 results and memory guidance.

Pika API extensions

Extend your generation workflow with Pika’s hosted endpoints:

Feature	Support	Endpoint
Higher-resolution video	Generate 1080p, 2K and 4K video from a draft video	Draft to video
Audio stems	Obtain separate audio stems	Audio stems
Prompt enhancement	Enhance generation prompts	Prompt enhancement

These optional hosted services are separate from the downloadable adapters and local inference package. The specifications above describe local model inference; see each endpoint’s documentation for its API capabilities and usage.

Run it

Clone the inference repository and follow its pip, Conda, or Docker quickstart. The pika-h3-pro command downloads the pinned base components and selected adapter. See the prompt guide for structured prompts.

Weight packages

Directory	Base trunk	Format
fl2va/	transformer	FP32 LoRA, rank/alpha 128
ref2va/	transformer_ref	FP32 LoRA, rank/alpha 128

The repository also includes Diffusers-format MiniMax-H3 base components: transformer/, transformer_ref/, text_encoder/, vae/, audio_vae/, tokenizer/processor assets and scheduler configurations, assembled by modular_model_index.json. These transformer checkpoints are base models; apply the matching Pika adapter separately. The Diffusers examples perform both loading steps explicitly. Base components occupy approximately 210 GB in total; a selected workflow loads only its matching transformer partition.

Each manifest records the public release ID, pinned base revision, adapter checksum, conditioning precision and exact six-step sampling schedule. Generic six-step Euler sampling is not equivalent. Base components: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3.

Other inference platforms

• ComfyUI — See the Comfy tutorial; use the R2V workflow, FL2VA workflow or T2V workflow. Comfy-format BF16 LoRA weights are included in comfy/loras/; see the adapter guide for downloads and checksums.
• Hugging Face Diffusers — See the official Pika H3 Flex documentation and our installation and generation examples for FL2VA first-frame conditioning and Ref2VA image/video references. The examples use the public upstream Diffusers commit pinned in examples/requirements-diffusers.txt; this installation is separate from the Pika CLI above.

Hardware and examples

The Pika CLI inference package runs one request on one GPU. Representative 480p and 768p CLI requests passed on H100 80GB. Large requests may require --cpu-offload and substantial host RAM. See hardware requirements and tested configurations. The separate Diffusers examples have their own installation and validation notes in examples/README.md.

The featured showcase manifest includes prompts, input assets and video hashes. Seeds, exact checkpoint revisions and service preprocessing for these examples are unspecified.

License

These adapters are Model Derivatives of MiniMax H3 and are distributed under the MiniMax H3 Community License Agreement.

See NOTICE for the required MiniMax notice and Mellis, Inc. copyright statement.

Bundled MiniMax-H3 base components retain the MiniMax agreement. The Qwen encoder and associated tokenizer/processor assets are covered by Apache 2.0; see the component sources and notices. The example Python code is covered by Apache 2.0; that code license does not cover model weights or example media.

Attribution

If you use these adapters in research or a product, we'd appreciate a credit to Pika and a citation:

@misc{pika2026flex,
  title  = {Pika H3 Flex Technical Deep Dive},
  author = {{Pika Research}},
  year   = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pika.art/blog/pika-h3-flex-research}}
}