Amazon Sponsored Brands video specs: what to check first

Amazon's Sponsored Brands video spec asks for a 6 to 45 second, 16:9 (square pixel) MP4 or MOV at 1280x720, 1920x1080, or 3840x2160, in H.264 or H.265 with the Main or Baseline profile, at one of seven listed frame rates from 23.976 to 30 fps, and at least 1 Mbps, with no letterbox or pillarbox bars. A Sume Timeline 1.0 render can set the size, frame rate, and length; the H.264 profile and the bitrate have no Sume setting, so check both before you upload.

Amazon's figures are quoted from its Sponsored Brands video ad specs page, read on 2026-09-27; Amazon can change them. Sume's come from the Timeline 1.0, Audio detach, and Video inspect docs, the Sume API reference, and Sume's media compiler as it works today.

What does Amazon require for Sponsored Brands video?

Amazon also asks you to avoid black, color, or blurred bars, to keep text and other important information out of the lower right corner, where the mute toggle sits, and to match the language of the marketplace.

How do I render a 16:9 ad at 1920x1080 with Sume?

Generate 16:9 clips first; seedance-2.5, for example, makes 4–30 second clips at up to 1080p. Then assemble them, or conform a single clip, with POST /v1/timeline-1.0/render, which reads your workspace's media.sume.com artifacts and writes MP4 only. Today its compiler sets square pixels (setsar=1) and yuv420p on every slot. How to assemble a long-form video with Timeline 1.0 covers the rest of the request.

Keep the default cover fit, which fills the frame and crops the overflow: contain pads with black and blur with a blurred copy of the frame, the bars Amazon asks you to avoid. Timeline's 60 fps option is not on Amazon's list.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/render \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: sb-video-001" \
  -d '{
    "audio": {
      "url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/voice.wav",
      "duration_seconds": 20
    },
    "video": [
      { "source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/shot-1.mp4", "start": 0, "duration": 12 },
      { "source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/shot-2.mp4", "start": 12, "duration": 8 }
    ],
    "output": { "width": 1920, "height": 1080, "fps": 30 }
  }'

How do I get audio above Amazon's minimums?

A render's sound comes from its audio spine and optional soundtrack, not from the clips. The master inherits the spine file's sample rate and channel count, and Timeline encodes it as AAC at 192 kbps, above Amazon's 96 kbps floor. Pick the spine with Amazon's 44.1 kHz minimum in mind:

• To keep a generated clip's own sound, detach it with POST /v1/audio-detach. Its default wav inherits the source's sample rate, and sample_rate can instead be 44100 or 48000.
• Don't use an inspect transcript.audio_url as the spine. The API reference calls it a 16 kHz mono speech-to-text rendition.

Which Amazon specs can't a Sume render set?

Timeline refuses codec, crf, and other encoder keys with a 400, so these stay on your side. YouTube Shorts video specs compares Sume's encode setting by setting.

• Profile. Amazon takes Main or Baseline. Sume's docs don't state the H.264 profile, the probe doesn't report one, and there is no setting, so check it with your own tools and re-encode outside Sume if needed.
• Bitrate. Timeline encodes to a constant quality (CRF), not a bitrate target, so the bitrate follows the picture.
• 3840x2160. Timeline and video trim cap each edge at 2160 pixels, so use 1920x1080 or 1280x720.
• Progressive scan. Sume's docs don't state the scan type.

How do I check the file before I upload it?

Run POST /v1/video-inspect with frames: false on the rendered video_url; a probe-only inspect is unbilled. Compare width, height, fps, duration_seconds, video_codec, audio_codec, audio_sample_rate, and size_bytes with Amazon's requirements above. Average bitrate, audio included, is size_bytes × 8 ÷ duration_seconds; take off roughly the 192 kbps of audio before you compare it with Amazon's 1 Mbps video minimum. Get a video's duration, resolution, and fps shows the probe call.