A 10-second video in about 12 seconds
Germany's Black Forest Labs, which develops image-generation AI, announced the video generation model "FLUX 3 Max" on Oct. 19 (Oct. 20 Japan time). The research arm of U.S.-based fal, which provides infrastructure for running AI models, improved the company's foundation model "FLUX 3" through additional training and processing optimizations. It produces a 10-second video in about 12 seconds, matching the quality of China's ByteDance's "Seedance 2.5" while being 22 times faster, according to the company.
In fal's measurements, generating a 10-second landscape video at 720p took 12.45 seconds with FLUX 3 Max, 47.37 seconds with Google's "Gemini Omni Flash 1.1," and 277.80 seconds with Seedance 2.5. The original FLUX 3 took 126.44 seconds. All of these figures were measured by fal itself.
Tied with Seedance in a third-party evaluation
In an evaluation (provisional) by U.S.-based Artificial Analysis comparing image-to-video models, FLUX 3 Max scored 1139, tying with Seedance 2.5. The top spot went to "H3" from China's MiniMax with 1141, a gap within the statistical margin of error. Black Forest Labs' claim of a tie for first place is based on this overlap. The score is up 50 points from the original FLUX 3.
$0.17 per second, a quarter of that to mark the launch
Videos can be produced at 720p or 1080p, up to 20 seconds long. The model supports three methods of creation, from text, from an image, and from images of a scene's start and end, and audio is included by default. Pricing is per second of output video: $0.17 for 720p and $0.29 for 1080p. Until Nov. 7, prices are cut to a quarter, at $0.0425 for 720p and $0.0725 for 1080p.
Selling speed to encourage regeneration
In video generation, companies are competing on speed and price as well as quality. Black Forest Labs stressed that faster generation allows users to regenerate many times. At Google, there are also reports that the next version, "Gemini Omni 1.5," will extend the length of a single video from 10 seconds to 15 seconds.
