Draft 100 prompts at 480p, finish 15 at 1080p: the two-pass cost

A two-pass re-render of 100 stored prompts costs $152.75 on Sume: 100 drafts at 480p on seedance-2-mini (71 cents each, $71.00), then 15 keepers at 1080p on seedance-2-fast (545 cents each, $81.75). Rendering all 100 at 1080p on seedance-2-fast would cost $545.00.

The saving depends on how many drafts you keep. The sora-2 models and the Videos API were removed on 2026-09-24, so a team re-rendering a library can use the cheap tier to sort which prompts survive the move.

The arithmetic for three keep rates

All prices are for 8-second 9:16 clips. The draft cost does not change with the keep rate, so the final pass does the moving.

A draft is not a preview of the final

No Sume v1 video model accepts a seed, and each model reports seed: false in the catalog. A 480p draft therefore does not constrain the 1080p take: it is a new generation. If you want a draft that looks like the final model, draft on the final model at a lower resolution.

On seedance-2-fast at 480p an 8-second clip is 113 cents, so 100 drafts cost $113.00. With 15 finals at 545 cents, the plan costs $194.75. That is $42.00 more than drafting on mini, and the draft is the same family as the final.

How to run the two passes safely

Give each pass its own idempotency keys. A draft and a final of the same prompt are different operations with different payloads, since the model or the resolution differs, so a key built from the whole payload keeps them apart. Reusing one key for both would return the draft job instead of starting the final, or fail with 409 idempotency_conflict if the payload changed.

Store the job id, the model, the resolution and usage.cost for each draft in a row. When you pick the keepers, the final-pass script reads the keepers from that table and submits them, so a crash between the passes loses nothing. Use a wave size your queue can take, and cancel queued drafts you no longer need before they start.

When two passes do not pay

The break-even is simple. A 1080p fast clip costs 545 cents and a mini 480p draft costs 71. If you keep more than about 86 percent of the prompts, you pay for the drafts and the finals. Above that rate, skip the draft and render the final directly.

For a library you plan to keep 60 of 100, the two-pass cost is $398.00 against $545.00, a saving of only $147.00. Draft passes are for libraries where most prompts do not survive the model change, which is common when the original was tuned for sora-2.