A 195-second render is too long for a Short: trim to 180 s for $0.02

If your Timeline render came out at 195 seconds, trim the finished MP4 to 180 seconds with POST /v1/video-trim: start 0, duration 180, flat $0.02 per job. Re-rendering the Timeline instead costs $0.30, because Timeline bills $0.10 per output minute rounded up and 180 seconds is three minutes. The original 195-second render was $0.40 (four minutes).

YouTube says Shorts are vertical and up to 3 minutes long (YouTube Help, read 2026-10-09), so 180 seconds is the limit to cut to.

Three ways to land on 180 seconds

Which is cheapest depends on whether you still have the render and whether the cut point matters.

The trim call

Trim needs the clip to be a media.sume.com artifact or asset in your workspace and an Idempotency-Key. Send only one of end or duration. The default precision is exact: a frame-accurate re-encode that keeps the audio as AAC. Precision keyframe copies the stream and can start a GOP early, which matters for a cut that begins mid-video but not for a start of 0.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-trim \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: short-trim-001" \
  -d '{"video_url":"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/render195.mp4",
   "start":0,"duration":180}'

# then: GET /v1/jobs/{id}/result -> video_url (new artifact), duration_seconds

What to check

• A hard cut at 180 s can land mid-sentence; if narration runs to 195 s, trim the narration spine first or shorten a clip so the last line finishes.
• Trim output is limited to 900 s and the source to 1800 s; a 195 s file is well inside both.
• If end goes past the source, the result clamps with the trim_clamped_to_source warning.
• The result is a new artifact; the source is unchanged.