Lunar New Year 2027 greeting video: a plan from 126 days out

Lunar New Year 2027 is on Saturday, 6 February 2027, which is 126 days after 3 October 2026. A 15-second greeting (six stills, a music bed, two caption cues) costs about $0.62 on Sume's published rates, so the only real constraint is that you finish the stills before the week of 1 February, not the budget.

The date comes from the table on Wikipedia's Chinese New Year page, read on 2026-10-03: Saturday 6 February 2027, a Goat year in that table. Everything about Sume below comes from the Image API, Timeline 1.0, Music Router and Video captions docs.

Why plan it in October

Most greetings are made the week before, from whatever photos are on a phone. Starting now lets you shoot or collect the six images once, test two music beds, and still have a spare cycle if a render needs a redo. It also lets you decide the one question the tools cannot answer for you: which language and script the greeting is written in.

The five-step build

Each step is one documented job, and the output of one becomes the input of the next as a Sume-hosted media.sume.com URL.

Writing the timeline

Timeline takes one audio spine and ordered video slots. A greeting with no voice can declare audio.mode: "silence" with a duration_seconds of 15 and add the track as soundtrack. Stills are static holds, fit defaults to cover, and transitions (fade, dissolve, wipeleft and others) go on every slot after the first. The default output is 1080 by 1920, which is the vertical frame most greetings are sent in.

Run POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan first. It is unbilled and returns duration_seconds, segment_count and billable_minutes, so you see the $0.10 before you commit.

Text: what to put in the picture and what in captions

The caption docs describe Latin faces (slam, punch, tiktok-green) and a list of Hangul faces. They do not document Chinese-character support, so do not plan on burning Chinese characters with the caption job. Use cues for an English or pinyin line such as the wish and your shop name, and keep any Chinese calligraphy inside the designed still, then check the generated image before you use it.

import os, sys, uuid, requests

def main():
    key = os.environ.get("SUME_API_KEY", "")
    if not key:
        sys.exit("Set SUME_API_KEY first")
    body = {
        "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/YOUR_ARTIFACT/clean.mp4",
        "style": "slam",
        "cues": [
            {"text": "Happy Lunar New Year", "start": 0.0, "end": 4.0},
            {"text": "Open again Monday 8 February", "start": 10.0, "end": 14.5},
        ],
    }
    resp = requests.post(
        "https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions",
        json=body,
        timeout=60,
        headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + key,
                 "Idempotency-Key": str(uuid.uuid4())},
    )
    print(resp.status_code, resp.json())

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

What Sume does and does not do

• Does: generate and edit stills, generate a music bed, assemble and caption, and return one MP4 per job.
• Does not: schedule posts, translate your greeting, or tell you which wording suits a given family or region. Have a fluent speaker read the final text.
• Does not: guarantee a model renders a specific traditional motif correctly. Review every still.

Dates around it

The same Wikipedia page is the source for the 6 February date only. Pair this post with the Lantern Festival plan if you want a second send two weeks later.