Gemini Omni Flash adds cuts: how to prompt a single shot

Gemini Omni Flash tries to build a short narrative from a prompt, so a clip often contains a few different shots. To get one unbroken take, say so in the prompt: Google's guide gives "In a single unbroken scene", "In a single continuous shot" and "No scene cuts" as phrases that work. Put the phrase first, then describe the camera and the action once.

These details come from Google DeepMind's Omni prompt guide and the Gemini API Omni documentation, both read on 2026-10-03. The Sume request at the end uses the catalog id gemini-omni-flash-1.1.

Phrases Google's guide gives

The guide separates three jobs: forcing one scene, naming a continuous shot style, and fixing the camera. The first two stop automatic cutting; the third stops camera drift. Use one from each group, not all of them at once, because a long list of constraints tends to read as noise.

Where to put the phrase

Start the prompt with the shot instruction and keep the action to one clear beat per second or two. A prompt like "In a single continuous shot, locked off, a barista pours milk into a cup and slides it across the counter" gives the model one job. Adding "then cut to" or a second location invites exactly the cut you tried to avoid.

If you actually want cuts at known moments, the other direction is also documented in existing Sume posts such as the one on timecode prompts for scene cuts. Choose one approach per clip.

Check the result for hidden cuts

A short clip can hide a cut in a fast move. Sume's Video inspect surface probes a Sume-hosted clip and samples stills from it, so you can request frames across the clip and look for a change of setting. It reads one media.sume.com clip, never re-encodes it, and is billed by its compute, so it costs far less than another render. Sample at least one still per second of a 10 second clip.

The request

Omni on Sume accepts 3 to 10 seconds at 360p, 720p, 1080p or 4K, in 16:9 or 9:16, with synced audio always on. The Idempotency-Key header makes a retry safe.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-router/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: omni-single-shot-001" \
  -d '{
    "model": "gemini-omni-flash-1.1",
    "prompt": "In a single continuous shot, locked off, a barista pours milk into a cup and slides it across a wooden counter. Morning window light.",
    "resolution": "720p",
    "duration": 6,
    "aspect_ratio": "16:9",
    "mode": "async"
  }'