Six Motion Control jobs: 29.8 s of footage bills 32 s, $5.04

Six Kling 3.0 Motion Control jobs on Sume with driving clips of 4.5, 6.2, 3.8, 5.0, 7.4 and 2.9 seconds bill 5 + 7 + 4 + 5 + 8 + 3 = 32 seconds in total. At $0.1575 per output second that is $5.04, even though the footage adds up to only 29.8 seconds.

Rounding happens per job

The catalog says the route reserves ceil(duration_seconds) x the Kling list price after Sume's margin, with output length following the driving video. Each job rounds on its own, so six jobs round six times.

Two practical notes. The output length follows the driving video, so the 'Bow' job is a 3-second clip, and a short move is cheap. And because each job is independent, a failed job does not affect the other five; the catalog says failed jobs are refunded before capture, so only the successful clips stay on the bill.

The cost of rounding

One 29.8-second driving clip would bill 30 seconds, $4.725, so doing six moves as six jobs costs $5.04 - $4.725 = $0.315 more. That is the price of getting six separate clips, each a different move, which you can arrange and reuse. A single long clip would give you one continuous motion.

If you can shape your reference footage to land on whole seconds, you save up to the difference: 29.8 s of raw footage would be 29.8 x $0.1575 = $4.6935, so the rounding overhead is $0.3465 in total, about 7 percent of the bill.

If you plan to reuse the moves, store the six result clips with the move name and the driving-clip length. That turns a one-off $5.04 spend into a reusable library for the mascot, and later jobs can reuse the same driving clips only if you want the same motion again.

• Use video trim ($0.02 flat) only when a cut crosses a whole-second boundary.
• Keep the same mascot still for all six jobs so the character stays consistent.
• Each job needs its own Idempotency-Key.

Scaling the set

Repeat the set for four mascots and the billed seconds are 4 x 32 = 128, or $20.16. The maximum of any single job is 30 seconds ($4.725), so no single driving clip can exceed that.

Document the driving clips themselves. A 'Spin' clip that runs 5.0 seconds exactly costs 5 x $0.1575 = $0.7875, but the same spin filmed at 5.1 seconds costs 6 x $0.1575 = $0.945. If you film the references yourself, a countdown and a clapperboard moment let you cut to the second in an editor before upload. That small habit removes most of the $0.3465 of rounding overhead, and the clips become reusable assets in your library.