90-Second News Explainer Video: Stills, Voiceover, Timeline, $1.06

The short answer

A 90-second vertical explainer on a news topic costs about $1.06 at Sume list prices: two trending-video research calls ($0.20), six Nano Banana 2.1 stills at 1K ($0.60), 1,200 characters of voiceover ($0.057) and a timeline render that bills as 2 minutes ($0.20). The prices are Sume's catalog values from 2026-10-08.

Research first, then draw

Sume's trending videos endpoint returns ranked public TikTok video metadata: watch URL, cover thumbnail, author handle and metrics. It is a research utility, not a generation model, and it does not return downloadable video files. Each accepted call is $0.10, and the cache can serve repeat browse calls. Production requires a query, and the window can be yesterday or this-week, which suits a story that broke this week.

Use the results for the angle (what viewers ask) and not for the facts. Verify claims against primary sources such as the original report, filing or official statement, and say in the script where each claim comes from. Sume does not fact-check a script for you.

Pacing and render

Ninety seconds of voice at six stills is one picture every 15 seconds, which is slow for a vertical feed. Use the timeline's slot list to cut faster: 12 slots of 7.5 seconds each show each still twice, once with fit set to cover and once to contain. Stills are static holds in Timeline 1.0, and the slot fit can be cover or blur, so a 16:9 chart can sit on a blurred 9:16 background.

The default output is 1080x1920. Slots after the first can use a fade or slideup transition of up to 1 second. More than 8 adjacent fades is refused, so add hard cuts between them.

Re-do the budget when the story changes. If a correction arrives after you publish, you only need to re-render: the stills and the voiceover for unchanged sections stay as Sume media URLs, and a new timeline render is another $0.20 at two minutes. That makes a corrected version cheap, which is the right incentive for a topic that moves by the hour.

• Put the date on the first frame; a news explainer ages quickly.
• Name every source in the post description and on screen.
• Rendering at 90 seconds crosses a minute, so it bills as 2; trimming to 60 seconds saves $0.10.