Podia lesson video: 30 fps or below, H.264, 8 Mbps at 1080p

To make a lesson Podia accepts, render it as an MP4 at 1920x1080 and set the frame rate to 30, because Podia asks for 30 frames per second or below and the Sume timeline can also render at 60. Sume lets you set width, height and fps, but it has no bitrate field, so you check the bitrate of the finished file yourself against Podia's figures.

What Podia lists

Podia's video guideline page (read 2026-10-10) names one primary format and a short list of encoding rules. Course creators who build lessons from AI clips, an avatar intro, and narration slides should compare each line against what the render step can set.

The fps trap

The Timeline 1.0 docs say that if you omit output.fps, the render follows the frame rate of the longest video source, and 30 applies only when no source has a rate. A stack of generated clips can carry different rates, so pin 30 yourself. A mismatch between a source and the output rate repeats or drops a frame every few frames, and the job reports it as output_fps_resamples_sources. Read the warnings array of the result.

For a single finished clip, video trim takes an optional output object with width, height and fps (24, 25, 30 or 60) and works only with precision exact, which is the default. That is the cheaper way to conform one existing file.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/render \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: podia-lesson-001" \
  -d '{
    "audio": {
      "url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/lesson.wav",
      "duration_seconds": 540
    },
    "video": [
      { "source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/slides.mp4", "start": 0, "duration": 540 }
    ],
    "output": { "width": 1920, "height": 1080, "fps": 30 }
  }'

Bitrate and size arithmetic

Podia's 8 Mbps figure for 1080p means about 60 MB for each minute of video (8 megabits a second times 60 seconds, divided by 8). That is arithmetic on Podia's number, not a measured Sume output. At that rate a 9-minute lesson lands near 540 MB, under the 1 GB Podia recommends, and the 4-hour limit never matters for short lessons.

Timeline renders cost $0.10 per output minute, rounded up, so the 9-minute lesson above is $0.90 per render (read from the Timeline 1.0 docs; confirm the live rate in GET /v1/catalog). If you re-render a corrected lesson, you pay again, so run the free plan call first.

Q4 course sale checklist

Podia's own page is the source for every number in the Podia column above, so re-read it before a launch; vendors change these limits.

• Pin output.fps to 30 on every lesson, trailer and bumper that goes into Podia.
• Render at 1920x1080 for lessons and 1280x720 where the source is a slide deck with big text.
• Use a captions pass for the sale-week trailer: standalone captions are $0.20 for videos up to 60 seconds.
• Check the finished file size before upload, because Podia recommends staying near 1 GB.