Omni 4K costs twice 1080p per second on Sume: is it worth it?

On Sume, Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 at 4K costs $0.375 per second against $0.1875 at 1080p, so 4K is exactly double. A ten-second clip is $3.75 at 4K and $1.88 at 1080p; the difference is $1.87 per clip.

Google lists 1080p and 4K as the premium outputs of Omni 1.1 Flash, above the 720p standard and the 360p draft (Google blog, read 2026-10-05). On Sume the choice is the resolution field on gemini-omni-flash-1.1; 4K and lowercase 4k are both accepted.

The ladder

Prices are the provider list times 1.25, rounded up to the cent per clip. The 4K row is the only one that exactly doubles the row above it.

When 4K earns the doubled price

• The clip will be cropped or punched in afterwards, for example a 9:16 crop from a wide shot, where spare pixels are used.
• The delivery is a large display or a cinema-style reel where 1080p visibly softens.
• It is the one master you will cut many versions from. A 4K master for $3.75 beats re-rendering several 1080p variants.
• You have already approved the shot at a cheaper tier, so 4K is a final-only step.

When it does not

• Phone-first vertical delivery. Social players re-encode to a lower resolution than the master anyway.
• Early iteration. A 360p draft is a tenth of the 4K price, and a prompt flaw looks the same at either size.
• Anything below ten seconds where the extra $0.94 or less per clip is simply not worth debating, but also not a reason to default to 4K.

Note on what 4K means here

Google's blog lists 1080p and 4K as upscaled output on top of the native generation. Treat 4K as a delivery-resolution option rather than a promise of new detail, and compare a 1080p and a 4K render of your own prompt before committing a whole batch. A one-clip test costs $1.88 and $3.75.

What the doubling looks like at batch size

Doubling is easy to say and easy to underestimate. A single ten-second clip adds $1.87. A 20-clip product line adds $37.40. A 60-clip catalog refresh adds $112.20. None of these is large against a media budget, but all of them are avoidable when the delivery does not need 4K.

The reverse also holds: if one hero clip carries a launch, spending $3.75 on its 4K master is a rounding error beside the cost of producing the brief. Spend 4K on the shot that is seen the most, and let supporting shots run at 1080p or 720p.

A cheaper way to decide

Run the same prompt three times before a batch: 360p ($0.38), 1080p ($1.88) and 4K ($3.75), all ten seconds. The set costs $6.01. Put the 1080p and 4K versions on the screen where your viewers will see them and decide from that, not from the spec sheet. If your reviewers cannot tell which is which, the 4K tier is $1.87 per clip you did not need to spend.

For a batch of 30 clips the difference between all-1080p and all-4K is $56.10. That is the size of the decision, and it is small enough that a one-time $6 comparison is easily justified.

Costs outside the render

A 4K file is larger, so downloads, storage and any re-encode step take longer and cost more on your side. Sume's price covers generation only. If you plan to trim or filter the result afterwards, test one 4K clip through the same steps; the Video Trim page covers trimming.

Request

Only resolution changes between the tiers:

{
  "model": "gemini-omni-flash-1.1",
  "prompt": "Rotating perfume bottle on black glass, soft rim light",
  "resolution": "4K",
  "duration": 10,
  "aspect_ratio": "16:9"
}