30-second holiday UGC ad with a music bed: a $7.59 end-to-end receipt

One finished 30-second holiday UGC ad with captions and a ducked music bed costs $7.59 on Sume: $7.35 for the avatar video at Plus quality, $0.01 to detach its voice, $0.13 for the music bed and $0.10 for the Timeline mix. Captions are burned in during the avatar job and add no separate charge.

The ad has four steps because a music bed has to be mixed under the voice, and the mix is a Timeline job whose audio spine is the voice.

The four steps

Step 1 renders the avatar video with inline captions. Step 2 detaches its audio as a wav, so the voice becomes a reusable file. Step 3 generates the bed. Step 4 renders a Timeline with the voice as the spine, the avatar video as the one video slot, and the bed as the soundtrack with duck_db set.

Details that cost a retry

Timeline accepts only Sume-hosted media, so the avatar's output and the detached wav are already eligible, while a bed you made elsewhere must be imported first. duck_db needs a real audio spine, which the detached voice is. Timeline's default output is 1080×1920, while avatar video is 720p, so the clip is scaled to fit under the default fit: cover.

Because captions were burned into the avatar video in step 1, the Timeline render keeps them. If the caption stage soft-fails, the job still returns a clean video with captions.status set to failed, and you can add captions later with the $0.20 standalone job.

Scale it to a test

Ten different hooks, each as a 30-second ad with its own bed, cost 10 × $7.59 = $75.90. Keep the bed constant across hooks if the test is about the script, since you then save $1.17 against one bed per hook: reuse one bed and the total is 10 × ($7.35 + $0.01 + $0.10) + $0.13 = $74.73.

When to skip the bed

Most social platforms add their own sound library, and many UGC-style ads perform without music. If the ad runs as a paid placement with sound on, a quiet bed under the voice helps. If your test is about hook wording, skip the three extra steps and pay $7.35 per ad. The $0.24 for the bed, detach and mix is small, but the extra steps are where jobs fail.