MiniMax H3 is the engine that changes how much this whole course costs you. It is a third prompt dialect, not a variant of the two you learned in lesson 9 (Seedance 2.0 and 2.5, two dialects), and the differences are not cosmetic: there are no at-mentions, no audio symbols, no negative field, no bracketed timeline, and the sound is described once for the whole clip instead of beat by beat. Paste a Seedance storyboard in unchanged and H3 renders your <sfx> brackets and your @Image1 labels as what they are to it, which is literal text.
Two things make it worth learning anyway. It has the cheapest usable draft tier in the stack, and it is the cheapest engine that accepts a reference video, which is the single fact that makes the Blender workflow in lessons 11 and 12 (Blender previz, build the blockout, and Blender previz, submit and iterate) affordable for one person paying their own bills.