Overview

Z-Image Turbo and LTX 2.3 img2vid combo (also with Flux 2 Klein 9B for additional controls) are actually really strong together for maintaining natural looking styles that feel far more alive than even some shots I would get with Seedance 2.0.

Initial Frames

Z-Image Turbo after all these months, I find to still be the best overall model for style, realism, and speed.

The easiest way still of getting around the bland low variation of outputs at least for me, is to still use the old random image input method with high denoise. Pass it through a second upscale phase with low denoise optionally for more details (not needed as much actually for older cinematic films with how detail worked with their depth of fields/lighting and what not).

The base model with no LoRAs can actually perform very well on older film styles. I tried including a cinematic lora of my own but it generally had little influence compared to the base model. My old last days of film LoRA helps a good bit with adding detail into the scene, but you need to be careful with its strength and which situations it works well for.

I would recommend actually using Flux 2 Klein 9B for additional controls in scenes. It performs decently well out of the box with things like zooms and what not (though I am sure can be improved when combined with proper LoRAs). Due to time pressure, I made the mistake in my original video of using nano banana for some zooms which ruined the style for those frames when I could have stuck to Flux Klein.

Img2Vid

LTX 2.3 with even the basic image2video workflows provided from ComfyUI and Lightricks are enough as is to bruteforce generation of shots. At most just maybe experiment with the distilled LoRA strength and the amount of detail in the prompt (also try using a wide image with a letterbox for less still image videos. prompt for action midway and what not to avoid other stillness issues).

It is a surprisingly good model as well for getting subtle emotional actions out of a characters as well.

Additional Info

This video is actually a trailer for my original film submitted to the Arca Gidan open source video contest. If you have the time, I strongly recommend you check out all the videos there that everyone put a lot of hard work into making.

You can view the full film directly, it is available here: Susurration, Lies and Happiness
(Be warned the film has the usual expectations of what you may fine in a video made one day before the deadline.)