Esports highlight reel music: a 45-second hype bed with a drop

For an esports highlight reel, ask for a tense, driving electronic bed of about 45 seconds with a clear drop at 0:20 and place your best clutch play on it. On Sume that is one generation at $0.125 plus a one-minute Timeline render at $0.10, so $0.225 for the soundtrack and assembly.

Highlights are cut to the beat. The cuts land on the drop, so the brief names the build, the drop and the outro with timestamps, which gives the editor fixed anchors. Game audio is usually loud, so decide up front whether the game sound or the music leads.

The brief to send

This prompt defines a build to the drop, a heavy drop for the highlight, and a short outro.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/music-router/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: esports-highlight-reel-music-45-second-h-001" \
  -d '{
      "model": "sume/music-auto",
      "prompt": "Aggressive esports hype, 140 BPM, F minor. Distorted synth bass, tight kick, snare rolls, bright arps. [0:00-0:20] Tense build with riser. [0:20-0:40] Heavy drop, full bass. [0:40-0:45] Short outro stab. Hard, loud, modern festival-EDM production. Instrumental, no vocals. A 45-second track."
    }'

Why each axis is set that way

Getting the length right

The router offers no duration parameter; use section markers in the prompt, as Lyria 3.5 understands them, and check where the drop actually lands in the returned file. If it lands at 0:18 instead of 0:20, shift your cut, not the music.

If you want the game's own audio on top, make it the spine in Timeline and set duck_db on the soundtrack. If the music should lead, use a silent spine with gain_db on the soundtrack.

Before paying for a render, call POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan with the same body. It is unbilled and reports the billable minutes, which for this 45-second video is 1. Then send the real POST /v1/timeline-1.0/render with an Idempotency-Key, wait up to 30 seconds in sync mode, and poll GET /v1/jobs/:id/status if it is still queued or processing. Statuses are queued, processing, completed, failed and canceled, and a 429 queue_full means try again shortly.

What it costs

One minute of render is $0.10, and the music is $0.125. If a team wants a different bed per player highlight, ten players cost ten generations and ten renders, $2.25 in all. Scaling is simple arithmetic. One finished video here is $0.225 of audio and assembly, so ten of them are $2.25 and fifty are $11.25, before any retries. Failed jobs are not billed as accepted generations, but a regeneration you ask for is a new job, so budget one or two extra takes for a hero clip.

Check before you publish

Build a small bank of beds, one per tempo, and reuse them across weekly reels. Because a generation is a flat price, the bank is cheap to refresh each season.

Keep prompts versioned so the team can regenerate a similar bed if a file is lost.

Sound design matters as much as the bed in this genre. If you want impact hits, whooshes or a riser under a specific clip, ask for them as separate short generations and place them on the cut; each one is the same flat $0.125, so a small kit of three impact sounds adds $0.375.

• Do not use a copyrighted game track; ask for an original bed.
• Check the game publisher's content policy for monetised highlights.
• Land the best play exactly on the drop after you measure it.
• Confirm the usage terms for generated music with Sume.