Trim, filter, frames, inspect or detach: which Sume media call?

Choose by the thing you want back. Need a shorter MP4: video-trim. Need the same clip darker or cropped: video-filter. Need still images at times you name: video-frames. Need facts about the file (duration, audio present) or a transcript: video-inspect. Need the sound as a wav or mp3: audio-detach. All five take one clip already on media.sume.com, never change the source, and are priced as small fixed or compute-based jobs rather than model generations.

Which output does each one return?

The five docs pages each end with a short table of neighbouring surfaces, and they agree with each other. The table below merges them, with the public rate where the page states one.

What if I need more than one step?

Chain them, because every result is a new media.sume.com artifact you can pass to the next call. A common order is inspect first (with frames: false to get only the probe), then trim to the part you want, then filter if the footage needs a dim or crop before text goes on top. Trim's result can go straight into a timeline as a video[] clip with source_in 0.

Check which limit bites first. Filter is the tightest at 300 seconds, so trim a long recording down before filtering it rather than the other way around. Detach needs an audio track and fails with detach_source_has_no_audio otherwise, so read probe.has_audio from an inspect first.

How do these calls report back?

Frames always returns 202 and is read from its own GET. Inspect defaults to a 30 second sync wait. Trim, filter and detach default to async, with an optional mode: "sync" that waits up to 30 seconds. In every case a 202 means poll the job, never resubmit. Writes need an Idempotency-Key, and the same operations exist as hosted MCP tools such as video_trim, video_filter, video_inspect and audio_detach.

• Off-host URLs are refused; import the file with POST /v1/media-imports first.
• The server compiles ffmpeg, so client fields such as vf, cmd, codec or crf return ffmpeg_fields_rejected.
• video-filter/check is an unbilled dry run that returns diagnostics and an estimate.