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wan-video/wan2.1

16,027PythonAudience · developerComplexity · 4/5Setup · hard

TLDR

Wan2.1 is an open-source suite of AI video generation models that creates clips from text prompts, animates still images, generates audio for video, and edits footage, all running locally on your own GPU.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((wan2.1))
    What it does
      Text to Video
      Image to Video
      Video to Audio
      VACE video editing
    Tech stack
      Python PyTorch
      Diffusers ComfyUI
      CUDA GPU
    Use cases
      Marketing clips
      Animation from stills
      Research prototyping
    Audience
      AI developers
      Researchers
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Generate a short promotional video clip from a text description for a product or social media post.

USE CASE 2

Animate a still product photo or illustration into a smooth looping video.

USE CASE 3

Add AI-generated ambient audio that matches the content of a silent generated video.

USE CASE 4

Fill in realistic motion between a starting frame and an ending frame to create a seamless transition.

Tech stack

PythonPyTorchCUDADiffusersComfyUIHugging Face

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

Requires a CUDA-capable GPU with at least 8 GB VRAM for the smallest model variant, larger models need substantially more.

In plain English

Wan2.1 is a suite of open-source models for generating video from prompts, described in the README as a comprehensive and open set of video foundation models. The repository ships the inference code and weights so that anyone can run the models locally rather than depending on a paid service. The suite covers several related generation tasks. Text-to-Video takes a written prompt and produces a clip, Image-to-Video animates a still picture, First-Last-Frame-to-Video fills in the motion between two given frames, Text-to-Image generates stills, and Video-to-Audio creates sound to match a clip. There is also a video editing pipeline called VACE, introduced as an all-in-one model for video creation and editing. Underneath these tasks sits Wan-VAE, a video encoder-decoder that can compress and reconstruct 1080P videos of any length while keeping their temporal information intact, which is what lets the higher-level models work efficiently. One advertised feature is that Wan2.1 can render readable Chinese and English text inside generated video. A smaller 1.3B-parameter variant of the text-to-video model is sized to fit on consumer GPUs, needing about 8.19 GB of VRAM and producing a five-second 480P clip on an RTX 4090 in roughly four minutes. Someone would reach for Wan2.1 to prototype short video clips from a text description, animate marketing or research stills, build tools on top of a strong open video backbone, or compare against closed commercial video generators. The code is Python and weights are also published on Hugging Face and ModelScope, the models are integrated into Diffusers and ComfyUI. The full README is longer than what was provided.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Using Wan2.1 text-to-video, help me write an effective prompt to generate a 5-second 480P clip of a calm sunset over a mountain lake on an RTX 4090.
Prompt 2
I have a product photo and want to animate it with Wan2.1 Image-to-Video. Show me the Python inference code and a motion description prompt I should use.
Prompt 3
Set up a ComfyUI workflow that runs Wan2.1 to generate a video from text and then pipes it through the Video-to-Audio model to add matching sound.
Prompt 4
Help me run the 1.3B Wan2.1 model on a GPU with 8 GB VRAM and generate a 480P 5-second clip as fast as possible.
Prompt 5
I want to edit an existing video clip using the VACE pipeline in Wan2.1. Show me how to load the model and call it with a text editing instruction.
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