Orthodox Christmas greeting video for Jan 7, 2027, from photo cards

For an Orthodox Christmas greeting on January 7, 2027, build a 30-second video from four to six greeting cards and a music bed: generate the music with Music 1.0 ($0.125 per generation), put the cards into a Timeline 1.0 render in audio.mode: silence with the music as soundtrack, and pay $0.10 for the render. That is about $0.23 for music plus render, plus whatever your card images cost. A business with Eastern Orthodox customers can schedule it a week ahead and post it on the day.

The date is the one fact to get right. The Wikipedia article on Christmas in Russia says Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on 25 December on the Julian calendar, which corresponds to 7 January on the Gregorian calendar (read 2026-10-12). A greeting that goes out on December 25 reaches those customers two weeks early.

Why does the date matter for a small business?

Many shops go quiet after the first week of January and drop their holiday content. A second, smaller greeting on January 7 reaches customers who were not part of your December campaign, and it costs a few cents to produce. Treat it as its own post, not as a late copy of your December 25 video.

How do I make the music bed?

Music 1.0 runs on Google Lyria 3.5 according to the Sume docs, and the prompt controls the structure: ask for a length and use section markers such as [0:00-0:30] Intro: .... Sume's docs say the price is a fixed $0.125 per accepted generation, regardless of prompt length. Ask for a calm instrumental with bells and strings, and avoid naming a living artist or a specific song.

{
  "prompt": "A warm 30-second instrumental. [0:00-0:10] Intro: soft choir and bells. [0:10-0:30] Main: gentle strings, slow tempo."
}

How do I assemble it?

Generate your cards as stills, import them so they are Sume-hosted, and list them in video[] with a start and duration each. With five cards, five or six seconds per card fills 30 seconds. Stills are static holds in Timeline 1.0, so add a fade transition between slots after the first for polish. Set audio.mode to silence with a 30-second duration and add the music as soundtrack with a fade_out_seconds of a few seconds. Note that duck_db needs a real spine, so leave ducking out in silence mode.

Before rendering, call POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan, which is unbilled and returns the billable minutes and estimated cost.

What does it cost?

Both rates below come from the Sume docs, which also tell you to confirm the live rate in the catalog.

What should the cards say?

Keep the greeting short, in the language your customers use, and put your shop name on the last card. Check any greeting text with someone who reads that language before you post: an image model can misspell non-Latin letters, and a wrong word on a holiday card is worse than no card.