Local AI transitions between real footage, inside DaVinci Resolve: an honest test of LTX 2.5 and MiniMax H3 Omni vs Seedance 2.5

Kevin Vandermarliere is a VFX editor. His Oct 21 video tackles a common edit: an AI transition between your own real shots (outside the car, inside the car, a phone POV), generated locally with no credits. He does it through his own paid plugin, AI Video Studio, which runs in Resolve under Workspace → Workflow Integrations. It can send jobs to a local ComfyUI server, to fal or to the Higgsfield API. Treat it as the creator showing his own product. Its value here is that he shows every attempt, including the bad ones.

The workflow: grab the start and end frames straight from the timeline into a node view. Pick LTX 2.5's first-and-last-frame image-to-video model at 16:9 and 4 seconds, and preview at 480p (he says the 480p test took about 2 minutes on his RTX 3090). He writes a one-line idea and has the plugin's assistant (Opus 5.5 in his case, or local models) expand it into the full prompt. Then he gives feedback in plain words: 'rotate into the POV, not straight into the face; preserve my facial features'. It took him five generations, the last at 1080p and 25 fps, and it still morphs. A local MiniMax H3 Omni run on the outside-to-inside cut went better (he calls it 'really great'). The same frames and prompt sent to Seedance 2.5 on Comfy Cloud kept the most detail.

The finishing is the most reusable part, whichever tool you use. He trims the clips and adds a smooth cut, then hides imperfections with time remapping and quick zoom in and out, camera shake, radial blur, and a prism blur for chromatic aberration as the camera passes through the glass. Grading and sound effects then glue the shots together. If an AI transition is 90% there, these tricks are cheaper than another ten generations.

Related, and often misreported today: Resolve 21.1 (September) ships Blackmagic's own MCP server (File → Setup AI Assistants), so Claude Code or Codex can drive the timeline. It's Studio-only, though, not part of the free edition, even though some videos today call it free. Kevin's plugin handles generation, and the MCP handles editing. We haven't tested either, and the plugin price isn't verified. Credit Kevin Vandermarliere.