Repurposing TikTok and Reels to Shorts: restyle captions once, $0.20

HeyOrca's YouTube news roundup (read 2026-10-07) reports a Repurpose.io partnership for reposting TikTok and Reels videos to Shorts. A reposting tool moves the file; it does not decide whether the captions inside it suit the next platform. If the TikTok version has captions burned into the pixels, the Shorts copy inherits them, in the same place and the same style.

The fix is to keep a clean master and burn captions per platform. Sume's video captions job does that for a public HTTPS video URL: it transcribes the speech (or aligns your script_text), burns a style, and returns a captioned video.

One transcription, many looks

The first caption job on a clip transcribes the audio. After that, a restyle sends source_caption_id instead of video_url. Sume reuses the source video and the word timings it already holds, so speech-to-text does not run again. The docs say the price does not change, because a restyle is still a render.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: shorts-restyle-001" \
  -d '{"source_caption_id": "vc_123", "style": "punch"}'

What each platform copy costs

Each accepted standalone caption job reserves and captures $0.20, for videos of up to 60 seconds, under the current fixed estimate. GET /v1/catalog shows the live price.

Rules to know before you repost

• The caption job needs a public HTTPS video URL that Sume can fetch; localhost, private-network, signed or private URLs are rejected.
• Latin styles (slam, punch, tiktok-green) have no Hangul glyphs: Korean text on them returns a 400 rather than boxes.
• A clip with no speech fails with caption_no_speech; send cues or words with timings to burn authored text instead.
• punch and tiktok-green do not support design overrides; the other styles do.

The one habit that matters

Export the clean master before any platform captions are added, and treat each platform file as a render of it. Then a caption change is a $0.20 restyle, not a re-edit, and the Shorts copy does not carry text laid out for a different safe area.