Kick clips run 10 to 180 seconds: make a vertical short with Sume

A Kick clip is already a good size for a short, and Sume can reshape it. Kick's help page says clips are short videos of 10 to 180 seconds created from a livestream or a VOD, with a maximum of 180 seconds on desktop and mobile, and that a downloaded clip is an MP4 file. The page does not mention a portrait export, so a 9:16 version is something you produce yourself, and the Sume tools for that are video filter crop, video trim and video captions.

The result is a short that is built from a clip you already have, with three paid steps that are each a few cents. The sections below give the order and the numbers.

What the Kick page says

Kick's page also gives some rules about who can clip. Any logged-in viewer can make a clip of your stream, and the streamer can too. A banned viewer cannot clip, and there is a 60-second cooldown between clips. Those are Kick rules and have nothing to do with Sume, but they matter if you plan a batch.

One more consequence of the cooldown is that you cannot rely on Kick to give you a clip per minute during a fast highlight run, so decide in advance which moments deserve a clip.

Import, then crop

A 180-second clip is well under the 300-second source ceiling of video filter, so no pre-cut is needed. Download the MP4, import it into your workspace with the media imports endpoint, and use the resulting media.sume.com URL. Sume's tools only read your own hosted media and do not fetch arbitrary links.

Then crop. A centered 9:16 window from a 16:9 frame has a width of 0.3164 and an x of 0.3418, and the filter's check endpoint is free. For gameplay with a facecam, a centered crop usually cuts off the interface, so you may prefer an off-center x.

After the crop, probe the result with video inspect and frames set to false. If the source was 1920 by 1080, expect a frame about 608 pixels wide and 1080 tall, because the compiler rounds to even values. That is vertical but small. For a platform that prefers 1080 by 1920, scaling up will look soft, so judge on a phone screen before you commit.

The two requests

The code below builds the two requests, a crop and then a trim, and prints them. It does not call the network. Chain them by passing the video_url from the first result into the second.

import json

crop = {
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/kick-clip.mp4",
    "ops": [{"op": "crop", "x": 0.3418, "y": 0,
             "width": 0.3164, "height": 1}],
}
trim = {
    "video_url": "RESULT_VIDEO_URL_FROM_THE_CROP_JOB",
    "start": 0,
    "duration": 45,
}
print(json.dumps({"crop": crop, "trim": trim}, indent=2))

Trim, then caption

Captions come last. A stream clip has speech, so a captions job with no script_text transcribes it. The standalone caption price is $0.20 per accepted job at the current estimate, and that estimate is for videos of up to 60 seconds, so trim to 60 seconds or less to stay inside it, or check the live price for longer clips.

Each of the crop and the trim is a $0.02 job at the public rate.

Cooldown arithmetic for a batch. Kick's page says there is a 60-second cooldown between clips. A creator who wants ten clips from a stream therefore needs at least ten minutes of clipping time on Kick, plus the time to download. Sume's side is faster, since each job is independent and you can submit them as separate idempotent requests.

Rights

One caution. A clip belongs to the streamer and to the people in it, and the page says nothing about reuse rights. Get permission before you republish someone else's stream clip.