7-minute training video: free Timeline plan, then a $0.70 render

Before you render a 7-minute training explainer on Sume, call POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan. It is unbilled and returns duration_seconds, segment_count, billable_minutes and estimated_cost_usd_micros. For 420 seconds of output it should show 7 billable minutes, and the render costs 7 times $0.10, which is $0.70.

What plan checks

Plan runs the schema validation, the Sume-host URL check and the compiler, and returns a filtergraph_summary. It creates no job, reserves no credits and downloads no media, and it does not need an Idempotency-Key. It cannot predict the soft warnings for short sources that get padded or looped, because it does not read the media.

That makes it the right first call for a long training video with many slots: a typo in a transition type, a first slot that does not start at 0 or overlapping slots show up as a refusal before you spend.

Structuring a seven-minute lesson

A training video is often a voiceover with screen clips. Use the voiceover as the audio spine, up to 1,800 seconds, and declare each clip as a slot with start, duration and fit. fit cover fills the frame, contain letterboxes and blur fills the sides with a blurred copy, which suits landscape screen clips in a vertical frame.

Output defaults to 1080 by 1920. For a landscape lesson set output.width and output.height, even integers from 256 to 2,160. The compiler chunks renders automatically past 12 segments, and Sume refuses strategy single above 12 slots.

Mind the minute boundary

Billing rounds up. Exactly 420 seconds bills 7 minutes; 421 seconds bills 8, which is $0.80. If the narration runs at 7:03, trim three seconds from a pause or from the end card to stay at 7 minutes, or accept the extra ten cents. Plan shows this before you commit.

A practical note

A seven-minute lesson is easier to maintain as chapters. Render each chapter of one or two minutes separately and join them with a final render only if you need one file. A single-minute fix then costs $0.10 for that chapter instead of $0.70 for the whole video. The trade-off is a cut at each boundary, so end chapters on a still or a hard cut rather than a fade. Use the plan call on each chapter too; it is free, and it shows segment_count and billable_minutes before you commit a single cent.

Before you scale

Every price in this post is a Sume list price read from the public catalog on 2026-10-09, and the arithmetic is shown so you can redo it with your own counts. Rates can change, so re-read the catalog before a large batch and run a small test first. Sume bills the job's captured amount, and the job result tells you what was used, so compare the first run's receipt with your estimate before you scale the work to the full set.