Planned maintenance notice video: preview the frame, then render

For a planned-maintenance notice, create an Avatar video preview first, look at the first-frame still, then call generate-video on the preview id so the full render starts only once the framing is right. A 20-second notice costs $3.68 on Standard, $4.90 on Plus and $11.00 on Max.

The flow is from Sume's avatar video previews guide, read 2026-10-04. A preview checks composition, not wording: dates and times live in the script, so proof-read those yourself, because a wrong window in a notice is worse than no video.

Why preview for a notice

A notice goes to many people at once. Previews give a cheap place to catch a wrong background, a cropped avatar or a bad frame before you pay for a full render. The docs say preview stills are tier-independent and are reused, so approving at one tier and rendering at another does not need a new preview.

Create the preview

The body matches Avatar Video: exactly one of script or video_inputs, plus optional scene, quality, aspect_ratio, title and captions. Captions stored at create are applied only at generate-video; preview stills are never captioned.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/avatar-video-previews \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: maint-notice-preview-001" \
  -d '{"avatar_handle": "ops_host", "aspect_ratio": "16:9", "quality": "standard", "title": "Maintenance notice", "script": "Heads up. On Saturday night the service will be unavailable for about two hours while we upgrade our database. Your data is not affected. We will post an update here when it is done."}'

Approve and render

Read the preview resource until resource_status is ready, check preview_image_url, then start the video. An empty body keeps the quality chosen at create. Passing quality overrides only the final render tier, and admission, reservation and billing use the effective tier.

Structural fields (script, video_inputs, avatar_handle, scene, aspect_ratio) cannot change at this step; a new window or date means a new preview.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/avatar-video-previews/$PREVIEW_ID/generate-video \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: maint-notice-render-001" \
  -d '{"quality": "plus"}'

Cost of the notice

The render is priced per second at the effective tier. The docs I read do not list a separate price for the preview itself; confirm it in GET /v1/catalog before you budget a large batch.

Wording that survives a second reading

Name the day, the time zone and the length of the window in the script, and say the same facts in the email text so a reader can copy them. Say in the clip, the caption or the page around it that the presenter is AI-generated; the API does not add that label for you.