Exam-week review clips from lecture recordings: $1.41 each

An instructor with 12 recorded lectures of 28 minutes each can produce a transcript and five captioned review clips per lecture on Sume for $1.41 per lecture, $16.92 for the course. Final-exam weeks in many terms fall in December, which is about ten weeks from today, so this is the time to decide which explanations students will actually rewatch.

The approach is transcript first, clips second. Reading a transcript costs about 31 cents. Cutting the five segments you pick from it costs $1.10. Cutting clips blind, before reading, wastes the larger line.

Step by step

Import each lecture video. Run audio detach with a range for each 600-second chunk (a 28-minute lecture is 1,680 seconds, so ranges of 0 to 600, 600 to 1,200 and 1,200 to the end), then speech to text on each. That is $0.03 for detach plus 28 minutes at $0.01 for transcription, $0.31 per lecture. The lecture must be 1,800 seconds or shorter as a source; longer sessions need to be split before import.

From the timestamped sentences, choose five explanations of 30 to 60 seconds: the definition students confuse, the worked example, the common mistake. Cut each with video trim at $0.02 per job, using an exact start and end. Then burn captions at $0.20 per clip; the standalone caption job covers videos up to 60 seconds, so keep each clip within that. The transcript sentences can supply the caption text through the script text field.

Accessibility and review

Captions on short clips do not make the full lecture recording accessible. If your institution has to caption full recordings, the transcript from this workflow is a draft to correct, not a finished caption file, and the caption job here is limited to 60 seconds per video. Check your own accessibility office's requirements and the April 26, 2027 date linked in the related posts for public institutions in the United States.

The transcript has no speaker labels and no custom vocabulary, so technical terms, symbols and names will need a correction pass. Fix the text before you burn it into a clip: changing a caption after burning means paying for the caption job again. A cheap check is to read only the five chosen segments aloud against the clip before you submit the caption jobs.

If a term of 12 lectures feels like too many clips, the same math scales down linearly. Three clips per lecture is $0.31 plus $0.66, $0.97 per lecture and $11.64 for the course.