Reverse the ceiling fan: a 10-second demo clip for a lighting seller

Energy.gov's winter article tells readers to reverse ceiling fans so they run clockwise at low speed, which recirculates warm air downward. A lighting or home-goods seller can show that in one 10-second clip: the switch, the blades, a caption. Cutting and captioning it costs $0.22 on Sume, a $0.02 trim and a $0.20 caption job.

What the article says, and does not

The article names the direction and the speed and the reason. It does not give a temperature drop, a percentage saving or a fan size. A product clip should use the same three facts and no others.

Shoot the switch, not the room

Mount the phone under the fan, pointing up, and film the blades at rest, then the switch being flipped, then the blades at low speed. Put a strip of ribbon on one blade tip if you want the direction to read on camera. Direction is hard to see on a fast blade, so keep the speed low as the article advises.

Use one continuous 20-second take, and note the start of each beat so that the cut is accurate.

Trim, check, caption

Cut the best 10 seconds with video trim. If the ceiling is bright and the blades wash out, use video filter to dim the clip first. The /v1/video-filter/check call is free and tells you whether the program is valid, and the encode is $0.02.

Finish with video captions and one cues card: "Winter: clockwise, low speed." A second card can carry the shop name. Cues skip speech-to-text, so a clip with fan noise is not an issue.

Use the clip on the product page

Put the clip on every fan listing, since the tip applies to any fan with a reverse switch. For a fan that has a remote or app direction control, film that instead of the wall switch, so the clip matches the product.

The article's tip is about winter, so title the clip as a winter tip and keep it off the page in other seasons if the page is otherwise seasonless.

Before you publish

Sume tools read media from your workspace, so import the recording first with POST /v1/media-imports and use the returned media.sume.com URL as the trim source. A trim needs start plus exactly one of end or duration, and precision defaults to exact, which lands on the frame you wrote down.

Captions with cues take your text with start and end seconds and skip speech-to-text, so a clip with no speech never hits caption_no_speech. A caption job covers a video up to 60 seconds, which is why each clip here stays well under that. The ribbon on the blade tip does not need a caption of its own; one card naming the direction and speed is enough.

Keep the whole clip under 15 seconds and use the same two cards on every fan listing. If the same demo goes onto five listings, upload the one captioned file and reuse it, so you pay for one clip rather than five.