Hour-long podcast video to clips: the 1800-second source cap

You cannot feed a 60-minute podcast video to Sume's trim, detach or inspect tools in one piece: each reads a source of at most 1800 seconds (30 minutes) and fails longer ones as source_duration_exceeded. Split the episode into halves in your editor, import both, and cut clips from each half.

Which limits apply to a podcast clip pipeline?

A 60-minute episode is 3600 seconds, double the cap on the first three tools. Video filter and compose are tighter still at 300 seconds, so clip first, then filter.

How should you split the episode?

Sume has no tool that splits a source longer than its own cap, so do the split outside it, in the editor you already use. Cut at a natural break, such as an ad read or a topic change, and keep both halves under 1800 seconds. Then overlap: let the second half start about 30 seconds before the first one ends, so a clip that straddles the break survives in at least one half.

Import each half with POST /v1/media-imports, since the tools read this workspace's media.sume.com media, not the open internet.

How do you find the moments?

Run Video inspect on each half with transcribe: true and sentence segmentation. The transcript gives you timed lines to scan for a hook or a quotable answer. The duration_seconds hint is capped at 600 and omitting it reserves one minute of transcription.

How do you cut and caption each clip?

Cut with Video trim using start plus exactly one of end or duration. Exact precision is the default and is frame-accurate; keyframe is a stream copy that can start a GOP early, so re-base against actual_start_seconds.

Then caption the short clip, not the half. The standalone caption price is fixed at $0.20 for videos up to 60 seconds, so clips of 45 seconds fit under it.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-trim \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: ep42-half1-clip3" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/ep42-part1.mp4",
    "start": 612.4,
    "duration": 45
  }'

What does a ten-clip episode cost?

At the published rates, ten clips cost 10 trims at $0.02 plus 10 caption jobs at $0.20, which is $2.20, before the transcript charge on the two halves. Rates can change; the catalog is the source of truth.

Two things to watch: the trim result's video_url is a new artifact each time, and you pass that URL on to the caption job, never the source half. And a source with no audio fails detach as detach_source_has_no_audio, so probe first if a half came from a screen recording.

How do you keep the batch tidy?

Name idempotency keys after the episode, the half and the clip, such as ep42-half1-clip3, so a retry returns the same job instead of billing a second cut. Keep a small table of half, start, duration and the resulting trim video_url; the clip's start inside the half is not the start inside the full episode, so add the half's offset when you want to cite a timestamp.

If a clip needs captions in the show's house style, caption it after the trim and reuse the same style and design for every clip, so a week of clips looks like one series.

What does Sume not do here?

It does not pick the best moments for you in this flow, it does not reframe a wide shot to a vertical speaker crop in these tools, and it does not split an over-long source. Those parts stay in your editor or your own script.