Swap the presenter per market: one ad, two Recast jobs on Sume

To show a different presenter in each market, shoot the ad once and run one H3 Max Recast job per market, each with a different set of reference photos. Recast replaces the primary people in the source video with the people in your photos and keeps the motion, the camera, the cuts and the sound of the source. So the ad is the same in every version and only the person changes.

The sound stays too, which has a consequence that is easy to miss: if the voice speaks English in the source, every version speaks English. Recast changes who is on screen and not what is said.

What one job takes

Recast is the h3-max-recast id on the Video Router. The inputs and limits are fixed by the catalog. Because the route reads the length of your source, the cheapest version of a test is a short cut of the master, five to eight seconds long, with the presenter in frame. Check that the face swap holds up on that cut before you pay for the whole ad in every market.

A per-market workflow

Cut the master ad so that no shot passes 15 seconds, and if the ad is longer than 30 seconds, split it into sections that are each within the window. Collect one clear photo of the presenter for each market, and submit one job per market with the same source. Keep the prompt short and use it only to say what to preserve, such as the wardrobe or the setting, because the source already carries the action.

Think about what is truly local in each market and what is not. The presenter, and with a prompt the wardrobe, can change by market. The set, the product, the camera work and the voice cannot, because they come from the source. If the product packaging or the on-screen text must also differ by market, that belongs in the master shoot or in a later edit, and not in the Recast job. Deciding this before the shoot saves a re-shoot, because the master has to be right for every market it will serve.

Run the jobs under separate idempotency keys that name the market, so that a retry for one market never collides with another. When the results come back, review each at full size before the version goes into a campaign, since each is a separate render.

What it costs for a set of markets

The rate is $0.375 per second at 768p and $0.5625 per second at 1080p, which is the list $0.30 and $0.45 times 1.25, applied to the source length rounded up. The price scales with the number of markets and nothing is shared between jobs.

What stays the same, and what does not

Rights matter here too. Use photos of people who have agreed to appear in the ad, and keep the written agreement with the asset. The tool changes pixels, but the permission has to come from the person.

Name the photos and the jobs by market in your own records, and keep the reference photos next to the source file. When a campaign is renewed a year later, the same inputs reproduce the same version, and a new market is one more job against the same master.

Because the camera and the cuts are kept, the framing in each version matches the master, so the presenter's photo should have a similar framing and a similar angle to the person in the source. The sound is the master's sound. If a market needs another language, record that source version first, and then recast that one. See also whether Recast keeps the original audio and swapping two people in one clip.