Hailuo 3.0 in Runway: 2K AI Video With Native Audio

Runway has added MiniMax H3, sold in MiniMax’s own app as Hailuo 3.0, to its shelf of outside models. The launch came with an unlimited-generations offer for new Max subscribers that ran to August 23, 2026; that window has closed, and the model now sits on Runway’s normal credit pricing.

Hailuo 3.0 is MiniMax’s omni-modal video model, announced on July 31, 2026. One transformer reads text, images, video and audio together, then returns clips at up to 2K resolution and 24fps with stereo audio already in them. Clips run 4 to 15 seconds, and MiniMax charges $0.13 per second of 2K video.

Hailuo 3.0 on Runway: Plans and Credits

Hailuo 3.0 appears in Runway’s Tools and Workflows for anyone on a paid plan, Standard and above. The unlimited-generation offer that came with the launch was narrower than that: it applied to new Max plans only and it closed on August 23, 2026, with its conditions on a separate Hailuo terms page rather than in the banner.

Runway meters the model in credits. Output at 2K costs 15 credits per second and 768p costs 10. Image references add 2 credits each, video references add 13 credits per second of reference footage, and audio references cost nothing. Generations run 5 to 15 seconds on Runway, with 5 as the default.

Once a clip exists it stays inside Runway. You can take it into Edit Studio and change it with Aleph 2.0, or upscale it to 4K.

What Does Omni-Modal Actually Buy You?

MiniMax’s argument for H3 is that one network handles every modality instead of a chain of specialist models. Its announcement calls the model “a general-purpose omni-modal generation model,” and in practice that makes it an AI video generator with native audio: the same transformer takes in text, images, video and audio, and the video it hands back already carries stereo sound, from dialogue to effects to room tone. Nothing has to be scored or dubbed afterwards.

That design shows up most clearly in the reference system. A single generation accepts up to 12 reference files, which can include as many as 9 images, 3 video clips of 2 to 15 seconds each, and 3 audio clips. Since one model reads all of them, a face can come from a still, the camera move from a video clip, and a voice from an audio file within the same generation. Keyframes are the exception, because they cannot be combined with references.

Runway’s documentation leans on exactly that behavior. Its examples cover swapping a character in a reference video for a subject from an image while the original camera motion survives, and pacing a generation to the rhythm of an audio reference. You describe edits in plain language instead of setting parameters. Aspect ratios run from 21:9 down to 9:16, plus an adaptive option.

Counting the Cost Per Minute

MiniMax sells H3 through its API on pay-as-you-go terms, with no subscription tier. 2K video costs $0.13 per second, which works out to roughly $7.80 a minute. The first five reference images in a generation are free and each additional one costs $0.04. Audio references are free. There is a cheaper 768p tier at $0.09 per second, but it is still in closed beta.

Price is the comparison MiniMax wants people to make. Its own rate works out to about $7.80 per minute at 2K, and in Artificial Analysis’s comparison that sits against roughly $20.16 for Kling 3.0 at 1080p and $22.45 for Seedance 2.0 at 1080p.

The same Artificial Analysis run placed H3 first for video editing, second for text-to-video and third for image-to-video. One leaderboard, one evaluation. A ranking tells you less than what the model does with the prompts you actually care about. If you are shopping for a platform instead of a raw model, our best AI video generators comparison covers pricing and free plans alongside quality.

The MiniMax H3 Open Weights Are on the Table

Three days after the announcement, on August 3, 2026, MiniMax released the weights for H3-Base, a 33-billion-parameter dense transformer, under a MiniMax Community License that permits commercial use by organizations under $20 million in revenue, with attribution.

Two things temper that. The license’s territory clause excludes the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea: users there are not licensed to download or run the weights locally without separate written authorization from MiniMax, a carve-out the company ties to its ongoing Hollywood copyright litigation and to AI rules taking shape in those markets. And open weights are a narrower thing than open source: the training code and the data behind the model have not been published.

The Subscription Is Turning Into a Model Store

Runway’s changelog now reads like a catalog of other labs’ work. Kling 3.0, Sora 2 Pro, Nano Banana 2 and Seedance 2.0 all sit alongside Runway’s own Gen-4.5, and Hailuo 3.0 joins that list. What Runway sells now is access and workflow around models it did not train. InVideo runs the same play with 200+ models on one subscription.

For anyone making video, the audio matters more. A model that hands back sound in the same pass removes a step that used to mean a second generator, a timeline and a sync pass. Kling AI has generated audio and video together for a while, and H3 lands in the same territory at a lower per-minute rate. That is the kind of pressure that moves prices.

Then there is the published base model. Weights that organizations under $20 million in revenue can host themselves, outside the license’s excluded territories, change the math on what a closed API can charge for. Lightricks made a version of this argument earlier in August with LTX-2.5, also under a revenue-capped community license. Two open-weights video releases in two weeks starts to look like a pattern, and closed labs price against it whether they say so or not.

The open question is whether H3 holds up outside a leaderboard. Placing third for image-to-video and producing a shot you would actually keep are different tests, and only one of them has been run. For a plain-English refresher on terms like omni-modal and open weights, our AI video glossary has the definitions.

FAQ

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Sources

1. MiniMax H3 announcement - MiniMax, July 31, 2026
2. Video Generation API reference - MiniMax Platform
3. Pay-as-you-go pricing - MiniMax Platform
4. Creating with Hailuo 3.0 - Runway Help Center
5. Hailuo promotion terms - Runway
6. Artificial Analysis benchmark thread - Artificial Analysis
7. Runway changelog - Runway
8. MiniMax-H3 license Q&A - Hugging Face, August 2026
9. MiniMax H3 open weights exclude US, EU, UK, Korea from local deployment - TechTimes, August 4, 2026