Q4 gift guide video: five picks, five stills, price cues

A five-pick gift guide video costs about $0.82 on Sume: five Nano Banana 2.1 stills ($0.50), 400 characters of TTS ($0.0190), one Timeline render ($0.10) and one caption job with price cues ($0.20). The prices on screen are cue text, so they can never be misdrawn.

A gift guide is a list, and lists fit Timeline slots. Each pick gets one still and a sentence of voice-over; the price is a timed cue. If a price changes before Christmas, you recaption instead of regenerating. Rates are from the Sume pricing code (read 2026-10-10).

What is the endpoint chain?

Think of the guide as five rows in a table and make one job per row.

• POST /v1/images x5 with google/nano-banana-2.1, 1K, 9:16, one product mood each; use references for real products.
• POST /v1/tts-1.0/generate with an intro and five lines, segmentation.mode: "sentence", so you get six start times.
• POST /v1/timeline-1.0/render with six slots: the intro still and five picks, starts from the segment times.
• POST /v1/video-captions with cues: five entries like 'Reading lamp, $38' each timed to its slot.

What does it cost?

The video scales by number of picks only on image and voice, since the render and captions are flat.

What are the limits?

Timeline renders up to 200 slots, and renders over 12 segments are chunked automatically, so an eight-pick guide is fine. The render is billed per started output minute, so keep the guide under 60 seconds to pay one unit of $0.10.

Image models draw plausible products, not your SKU. If the exact product matters, upload a real photo as a reference and check GET /v1/images/models for the count it takes. Do not claim a model drew your real item. Disclose affiliate links in the post itself; Sume does not add that for you.

For the Q4 volume, a bulk queue helps; see the 12-days-of-deals queue. The caption cues shape is on the Video captions page.

How do I vary it for another audience?

Change only the TTS text and the cues. The same five stills with a different voice line is one TTS job ($0.019 for 400 characters), one render ($0.10) and one caption job ($0.20), or $0.319 per variant. That is the cheapest way to test two angles on the same list; compare with a three-hook A/B test from one body.

Pre-publish checklist

Cross-check each price cue against the product page on the day you post. Cues are plain text, so the fix is a recaption at $0.20, not a new render.

Keep the guide short enough that the last pick still gets attention. Five picks at six seconds each is a 30-second video.

• Confirm each slot start matches its voice line.
• Check the still for each pick looks like a gift, not an ad.
• Keep shipping cutoff dates in the post, not the video.