Outdoor event postponed: re-caption your clean promo for $0.20

When bad weather moves an outdoor event, do not regenerate the promo: burn a new caption layer onto the clip you kept without text. That is one POST /v1/video-captions job with cues at $0.20 per version on Sume, so 3 notices (postponed, new date, final reminder) cost $0.60, against $3.60 if each one were a fresh 8-second clip plus captions.

The catch is that burned-in text cannot be peeled off. The whole method depends on one habit: when you first make an event promo, keep the caption-free render as the master and treat every captioned file as disposable.

Why does the clean master matter?

The Video captions page describes the job as taking a public HTTPS video URL and returning a captioned video; it burns styles into the clean final MP4. The page lists no way to remove text that is already in the pixels, and a restyle with source_caption_id reuses the source video of that caption, which is the clip you started with. So the clean file is your insurance. Sume mirrors generated outputs into media.sume.com, and the Media inputs page tells integrations to store that Sume URL, so save the master's URL next to the event listing the day you make it.

How much does each notice cost?

Cue-only jobs do not run speech-to-text, so a silent or music-only clip works. The caption price is a fixed per-job figure for videos up to 60 seconds. The regeneration comparison uses Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 at 720p, which Sume bills at 12.5 cents per second (fal list x 1.25 per the repository price table; confirm in the catalog), for 8 seconds.

The request

Each notice is a new job with its own Idempotency-Key, so a retry never double-bills. The cues below say postponed first, then the rain date, then reassurance; keep one idea per cue and keep every cue short enough to read at a glance.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: postponed-notice-001" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_master/clean.mp4",
    "style": "slam",
    "cues": [
      { "text": "Saturday market: postponed", "start": 0, "end": 3 },
      { "text": "Rain date: Sunday, 11 am", "start": 3, "end": 6 },
      { "text": "Same stalls. Same place.", "start": 6, "end": 8 }
    ]
  }'

Steps for the weekend you lose

Run these in order the day the weather call is made.

• Look up the master's media.sume.com URL and confirm it plays with no text in the frame.
• Send the postponed cues now; post that version to the channels that carried the original.
• When the rain date is confirmed, send a second job with the new date as the first cue.
• Send the final reminder the day before. Change only text, start and end.
• If the original ad is still live with the old date, replace or take it down; the new clip does not edit it.

When to regenerate instead

Re-captioning fixes words, not scenes. If the footage itself shows sunshine and a banner with the old date inside the picture, burn nothing over it: that frame has to be regenerated. For a date drawn into the picture, the Video Router page describes a Gemini Omni Flash edit mode that takes a video_url and a prompt, or you can make a new clip. Everything else, which is most weather delays, is a $0.20 caption job.