Skippable in-stream has no max length: cut a 6-minute film under 3

Google Ads does not set a maximum length for skippable in-stream video ads, but its help page recommends keeping them under 3 minutes. If you have a 6-minute film, cut a version under 180 seconds. Sume video trim does a cut for $0.02 per job, and video inspect can give you a transcript to find where to cut.

What the Google Ads page says

The viewer can skip after 5 seconds. Cost per view counts at 30 seconds, or the whole video if it is shorter. That makes the 30 second mark the point that matters for cost, and a long film pays off only if it earns attention past it.

Find the cut points

Video inspect returns probe data, frames and an optional transcript. With segmentation set to sentence, the transcript comes back as segments, each with index, text, start, end and duration_seconds. The source can be up to 1800 seconds, so a 6 minute film (360 seconds) fits. Speech-to-text is $0.01 per audio minute plus Modal compute, so 6 minutes of audio is 6 x $0.01 = $0.06 before compute.

• Read the segments and pick the sentence that ends your story.
• Use that segment's end time as the trim end.
• Sentence boundaries make cleaner cuts than a round number of seconds.

Cut with trim

Video trim takes one clip, a start, and exactly one of end or duration. Duration runs from 0.2 to 900 seconds, so a 175 second cut is well inside the limit. Exact precision is frame-accurate and re-encodes; keyframe copies the stream and can begin a GOP early. If you ask for an end beyond the source, it clamps and the result carries the warning trim_clamped_to_source.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-trim \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: cut-175-001" \
  -d '{"video_url":"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/film.mp4","start":12,"duration":175,"precision":"exact","audio":"keep"}'

Cost

One exact trim is $0.02. Inspect with transcript on 6 minutes of audio is about $0.06 plus compute. So a first cut costs roughly $0.08 plus compute, and each later re-cut costs $0.02. The 5 second skip and the 30 second CPV mark are Google's rules; check your first five seconds with the frames call before you spend media budget.

Where this fits

A long film usually ends up as three assets: the full cut, a sub-3-minute cut for skippable in-stream, and a short cut for placements that pay at 30 seconds. Trim makes each of them from the same artifact, so the import happens once and each cut is $0.02.

Name each job's Idempotency-Key after the cut, for example film-175s and film-30s, so a retry after a network error returns the same job instead of creating and billing a second one.