Shortest clip each platform accepts: Spotlight, Reels, Kick

A clip of 10 seconds or more clears every minimum in this post. The Instagram Graph API page lists 3 seconds as the minimum duration for a Reel. Snapchat's help page says a Spotlight video needs to be 5 seconds or longer for the Post button to appear. Kick's help page says clips run from 10 to 180 seconds. Sume video trim and Timeline 1.0 go much lower, with a 0.2-second minimum, so the platform and not the tool sets the floor.

In practice you almost never hit a floor by accident with a normal vertical short, because a clip of a few seconds is already a complete idea. The floors matter for loops, stingers, reaction beats and the short sections that you cut out of a longer take, where a trim can easily land at 2.8 or 4.6 seconds.

The floors

The table puts the floors side by side, along with the Sume minimums. All platform rows come from the pages we read on 2026-10-05, and the Sume rows come from the docs.

Different kinds of floor

These floors mean different things. Reels' 3 seconds is an API parameter, and a clip shorter than that would be rejected by the API. Spotlight's 5 seconds is a condition for the button to show. Kick's 10 seconds is the lower end of the range for clips made on Kick itself, so it describes what Kick makes, and the page does not say it is a rule for files that you bring.

That distinction matters. A Kick clip is made on the platform from a stream, and the page does not discuss uploading your own short file as a clip, so do not treat the 10 seconds as an upload gate.

A second kind of floor is the one you set yourself. A 3-second clip passes Reels and still feels like a glitch, so treat the platform numbers as the lowest bar and not as a target.

Which destinations can take this clip

If your clip is a loop or a reaction beat that is naturally short, you have two choices: lengthen it or accept fewer destinations. The code takes a list of destinations and a clip length and returns which ones the clip can go to. Platform floors are in the dictionary and come from the pages above.

Run the check on the result of the trim, not on the plan. Frame-accurate cutting means the output is very close to what you asked for, and the probe duration_seconds is the figure to read, since the platform sees the file and not your intent.

FLOORS = {"reels_api": 3, "spotlight": 5}

def reachable(seconds):
    return [name for name, floor in FLOORS.items() if seconds >= floor]

for secs in (2.0, 4.2, 6.0):
    print(secs, reachable(secs))

Order of operations

Trim can always cut a clip down and never up, so the rule of thumb is to choose the destination first and cut second. Probe the final result and compare it with the strictest floor on your list, because a trim that removes a lead-in can push a clip under a floor that it cleared before.

A cut can fail in the other direction as well. If a lead-in has to be removed and the clip then falls under a floor, extend the end point if the source allows it, and probe again.

Cost

Sume trim costs $0.02 per job at the public rate, and you can confirm the live price in the catalog. Checking the result is a second inspect call, and frames set to false keeps it to the probe fields.

One more practical point: the minimums here are for the file you submit. A short clip can still be part of a longer sequence on a timeline, and what the platform sees is the exported total, so measure the export.