Pilates intro offer: one vertical clip, a square copy for 2 cents

A pilates studio can make one vertical intro-offer clip with MiniMax H3 Max for $1.00 at 768p and 10 seconds, then crop a square copy for the website with Sume video filter for $0.02. The pair costs $1.02, and you post the vertical one to stories and the square one to the page.

New-year sign-ups start in December, so studios post intro offers from the week after Black Friday. The clip should look calm and clean, and the offer details belong in text. Cropping, rather than regenerating, keeps both versions identical.

Generate the vertical master

MiniMax H3 Max (minimax-h3-max) generates 5 to 15 seconds at 480p, 768p or 1080p with native stereo audio, as the Video Generation docs describe (read 2026-10-10). Prompt a quiet scene: a sunlit studio, a reformer, slow movement seen from a distance, with soft ambient sound. Keep the figure small in the frame and avoid close-ups of faces and hands, which are where generated people look least convincing.

Sume prices H3 Max at $0.10 per second at 768p (the list is $0.08 and Sume adds 25 percent), so 10 seconds is $1.00. The same clip is $0.63 at 480p and $2.00 at 1080p. Do not show generated people as if they were your instructors or members.

Crop it square

Video filter has a crop op that takes the rectangle as fractions of the source frame: x and y between 0 and 1, width and height between 0.05 and 1. A 9:16 frame cropped to full width and 0.5625 of the height is square, because 1080 by 1080 is 0.5625 of 1920. Center it with y of 0.21875. The compiler rounds to even values.

Run POST /v1/video-filter/check first. It is free and returns diagnostics instead of an error. Then submit the real job with an Idempotency-Key. The source must be a media.sume.com clip in your workspace, which a clip generated on Sume is. The docs send you to the live catalog for price; the rate card lists $0.02 (read 2026-10-10).

import os, requests

H = {"Authorization": "Bearer " + os.environ["SUME_API_KEY"]}
body = {
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/intro.mp4",
    "ops": [{"op": "crop", "x": 0, "y": 0.21875,
             "width": 1, "height": 0.5625}],
}
r = requests.post("https://api.sume.com/v1/video-filter/check",
                  json=body, headers=H, timeout=30)
print(r.status_code, r.json().get("valid"))

Cost

Everything in one place (read 2026-10-10):

A posting plan for the weeks after Black Friday

Black Friday is November 27 and Cyber Monday is November 30. Many studios compete for attention then with discounts, so a calm clip posted a few days later can stand out. Post the vertical version to stories on the first Monday of December, put the square version on the website's offer page the same day, and repeat the story in the week before the new-year class block begins.

Keep a log of which version each placement used. If the square copy needs a different crop, for example because a figure sits low in the frame, adjust y and run the free check again before paying $0.02. Because the source file is never changed, you can crop the same master as many times as you need.

Sound and the offer

The generated audio is ambient. If you want a bed that you control, the Music Router charges $0.125 per track and you steer length in the prompt. Put the intro price, the class length and the booking link in text beside the post, and avoid claims about weight loss or health outcomes. For a sibling post on a quieter movement class, see yoga class promo with Omni.