Introduction

Ever shot a perfectly good clip under the wrong light? Open Video Relight is a new open-source ComfyUI custom node pack that lets you relight real video from a little 3D light stage. You drop lights onto a sphere around your subject, give each one a path and a plain-English description, and the workflow rebuilds the shot under that light while keeping the people and their performance.

It went up on GitHub (fredalinlinlin/ComfyUI-OpenVideoRelight) on October 30 at 14:55 UTC. The code is MIT, it runs locally in ComfyUI on open weights, and it ships with a ready-made workflow, OpenRelight_LightStage.json.

How it works

The pipeline chains three open models that ComfyUI already supports natively:

  • Read the clip: Qwen3-VL 8B (the Qwen-Image 2.1 text encoder, so no extra model) looks at the source shot and lists its lights, windows, surfaces, materials and which way people face
  • Light stage: the lights it finds appear on a sphere. Keep them, change them, delete them or add your own
  • Keyframe plan: two keyframes if nothing moves, up to three if a light travels
  • Lighting director: the same VLM turns your stage plus your descriptions into a mood plan and a prompt for every keyframe
  • Relight keyframes: Qwen-Image 2.1 edits the original frames. You can inspect each one and hit Redraw before committing
  • Extend to video: MiniMax H3 Ref2VA uses the original clip as its reference and the relit keyframes as guides, so the light carries through the whole shot

The author's side-by-side against plain H3 makes the point nicely. A prompt alone recolors the whole frame at once. With the stage, each light follows the path you set.

What you can do with it

  • Moving, multi-colour light: swap a red club light for magenta and cyan spots, each on its own path
  • Small fixes: turn a flat office into low evening sun
  • New background: move a dusk rooftop to a rainy neon street, with the light on your subject matching the new place
  • Lighting reference: feed it a still and it borrows only the light, for example a thin warm rim light tracing a profile

Hardware and speed

  • GPU: 12 GB VRAM. Tested on an RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU
  • RAM: 48 GB recommended. The video step alone uses about 37 GB
  • Disk: about 56 GB of models
  • Speed: keyframes in about a minute, a full 2–3 second clip in 2–4.5 minutes
  • Tested on: ComfyUI Desktop 0.41.1 with Nodes 2.0 enabled. No other custom nodes or Python packages needed

Install

Clone it into your custom_nodes folder and restart ComfyUI:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/fredalinlinlin/ComfyUI-OpenVideoRelight.git

Then download the models into ComfyUI's models folder. All but one come from Comfy-Org's Hugging Face repacks:

  • Keyframes: qwen_image_2.1_turbo_int8_convrot.safetensors (6.8 GB, diffusion_models)
  • Text encoder and VLM: qwen3vl_8b_int8_convrot.safetensors (8.7 GB, text_encoders)
  • Qwen VAE: qwen_image_2.1_vae_bf16.safetensors (0.6 GB, vae)
  • Video: minimax_h3_ref2va_pruned_int8_convrot.safetensors (19.5 GB, diffusion_models)
  • 8-step turbo LoRA: minimax_h3_ref2v_turbo_8step_v1.0_768p_comfyui_bf16.safetensors from lightx2v (1.8 GB, loras)
  • H3 text encoder: qwen3vl_32b_minimax_h3_nvfp4_awq.safetensors (14.6 GB, text_encoders)
  • H3 video VAE: minimax_h3_video_vae_int8_convrot.safetensors (2.6 GB, vae)
  • H3 audio VAE: minimax_h3_audio_vae_fp32.safetensors (0.6 GB, vae, required by H3)

Open workflows/OpenRelight_LightStage.json and check that the loaders in group ① find every model.

Your first relight

  1. In group ②, pick a video and set the start time and duration
  2. In group ⑤, click Generate keyframes once. The clip's own lights show up on the stage in group ③
  3. Add lights with + Add light or a double-click on the sphere, then drag them into place. Moving lights draw their path, and the play button previews it
  4. Set colour, brightness, softness and motion, and describe each light under Describe this light, like "a passing train"
  5. Click Generate keyframes again and Redraw any frame you don't love
  6. Click Run to render the video

Here is a paste-ready text for the Prompt field, adapted from the author's dance-floor demo:

Remove the red light from the people. Magenta and cyan stage lights move with the beat, landing softly on faces, shoulders and arms. The old light is gone.

The stage saves everything as plain JSON, so you can also hand-edit rigs. azimuth 0 is the camera side and 180 is behind the subject, elevation 90 is straight overhead, and intensity_ev is in stops relative to the scene's main light.

Tips from the author

  • A new light needs to be about 2 stops above the scene's main light to overpower it
  • Skip visible beams in the air. Qwen tends to paint see-through colour columns over people. Wide light that lands on faces and clothes looks far more natural
  • When you swap a background, name the time of day, like "deep night, the sky is completely black", or H3 may bring the old sky back
  • Qwen is sensitive to wording, so change one phrase at a time

Limits to know

  • Lights move in straight lines only. No orbits, and no aiming at a chosen object
  • With at most three keyframes, very short flashes can fade instead of cutting off
  • H3 runs at about 0.5 megapixels and is scaled back up, so results are soft. Pair it with an upscaler
  • Qwen can nudge small details like hair, so check the keyframes first
  • Only 2–3 second clips have been tested in this version

License check

The node code is MIT. The models keep their own terms: Qwen-Image 2.1 uses the qwen-research license, MiniMax H3 uses the MiniMax H3 Community License, and the lightx2v turbo LoRA lists no license. Read those before any commercial work.

Conclusion

Relighting used to mean a reshoot or a long night of manual grading. Open Video Relight turns it into placing little suns on a globe, and that's the kind of creative control open video has been missing. Expect rough edges at 0.5 megapixels, but the idea is a delight.

Want to play with H3 itself without a local install? Try this on Gen → https://artrealmai.com/gen?utm_source=magazine&utm_campaign=gen&utm_content=open-video-relight-comfyui-3d-light-stage-minimax-h3

Original Source

Go paint your footage with light!

—Aurelia ♡