Rebuild your best product ad with a new product: sume-recreate Format

The sume-recreate Format takes a reference video and your product photo, keeps the reference's structure, and generates every still, clip, audio track and caption from scratch with a new presenter. In Sume's first-party Format code, the instruction says it keeps scene order, beat timing, caption rhythm and the music or voice choice, builds one still per beat, animates each accepted still, assembles the beats on a timeline and adds captions last.

Use it on your own best ad, or on a reference you have the right to rebuild. A structure is not a licence to copy someone else's creative, and this post makes no claim about what is allowed for third-party videos.

What goes in

Call it as POST /v1/formats/sume/sume-recreate/runs. Send your product packshot as an attachment and the reference as a URL or attached clip in the instruction or input. A run needs at least one of instruction, input, previous_run_id or attachments. Attachments can be up to 30 images, and URLs inside input share one media budget of 30 files, at most 10 videos and 10 audio files; going over is 400 invalid_attachment.

A first run

Say what to keep and what to swap, and set a spend cap well under the default, because a multi-beat video makes many generation calls.

curl -sS -X POST "https://api.sume.com/v1/formats/sume/sume-recreate/runs" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: recreate-serum-ad-12-v1" \
  -d '{
    "instruction": "Recreate the structure of this ad of ours: https://cdn.example.com/ads/ad-12.mp4. Keep scene order and beat timing. Use the attached packshot as the product. New presenter, vertical 9:16.",
    "attachments": [
      {"type": "input_image", "image_url": "https://cdn.example.com/sku/serum.png"}
    ],
    "generation_spend_cap_usd": 60
  }'

Checking the result

Read the receipt when the run is terminal. primary_output_url is null on failure, and usage.billable_amount_usd_micros is the charge. If you score runs automatically, open the file rather than trusting the number beside it; a clip that is shaped like a video is not always the cut you asked for.

If one beat is wrong, continue the thread with previous_run_id and name the beat, which avoids re-buying the whole timeline. Compare this with the before-after Format, which builds a two-stage reveal rather than a many-beat ad, and with virtual fitting versus virtual try-on when the product is apparel.

A recreated ad is a new ad: check the claims, the price and any on-screen text against your own product before it runs on Meta or TikTok Shop.

Cost and review

A recreate run does many generation steps, one still and one animation per beat plus audio and captions, so its cost is the sum of those steps. The spend cap in the request is your guard: a run can never spend past its effective cap, and the Format default is $400 with a platform maximum of $500. Set a number you would be happy to lose on a bad run and raise it only after a good one.

Read the receipt's usage.billable_amount_usd_micros after each run and write it next to the ad's performance later. After three or four runs you will know what a typical rebuild costs and whether the lift justifies it.

Review the output as you would any ad. Watch the first two seconds, since that is where most feeds decide, listen with sound on and off, and read every on-screen word against your product page. Then compare it with your original ad's hook and pace. If the structure survived but the product detail is wrong, continue the same thread with a short correction rather than starting from nothing.

Finally, keep the reference, the packshot and the instruction together under one name so that the next run of the same recipe is a copy and a version bump.