Gemini Omni 4K is $0.375 a second, double 1080p: worth $3.75 a clip?

A 10-second 4K clip on Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 costs $3.75 on Sume. That is $0.375 a second, exactly twice the 1080p rate ($0.1875) and three times 720p ($0.125). Pay for 4K only when the clip will be shown, or cropped, at a size where 1080p visibly falls short.

For most social and product-page video, 720p or 1080p is the sensible default.

The four tiers

Omni accepts 3 to 10 seconds at 360p, 720p, 1080p and 4K, in 16:9 or 9:16. The rate roughly doubles at each of the last two steps.

Where the 4K price is justified

Large screens: an event LED wall, a lobby display or a trade-show loop. Anywhere the viewer sits close to a big panel, 1080p shows its edges.

Crop room: if you plan to punch in or reframe in an edit, extra pixels let you crop without softening. A 1080p clip cropped to half its width is no longer 1080p.

A master you will reuse for a year. Re-generating later costs more than paying for pixels now.

Budget view

Ten 10-second clips cost $12.50 at 720p, $18.75 at 1080p and $37.50 at 4K. If only two of the ten are hero shots, make those two at 4K and the rest at 1080p: $22.50.

A lower-resolution test is not a preview of the 4K clip. Each generation is separate, so motion can differ between the test and the final.

Where it is not

A phone feed re-encodes video, and a 4K upload gains little there. If the clip is going into a feed ad or a product page, test one 720p and one 1080p version first. The price difference over a 10-second clip is $0.63, which is cheap enough to settle by eye.

Google's own page lists about $0.10 a second at 720p for gemini-omni-1.1-flash on its Gemini API pricing page; Sume's $0.125 is that figure times 1.25. I did not find a Google 4K rate on the page I read.

Rates are the Sume card on 2026-10-07. Read pricing_skus from GET /v1/videos/models before you budget, because the live card wins over this page.