Test five presenters on one 9-second ad: Recast $16.90 at 768p

Five new presenters in one 9-second ad cost $16.90 at 768p and $25.35 at 1080p with H3 Max Recast on Sume. Each presenter is its own job, and each job is rounded up to the cent on its own: $3.38 at 768p and $5.07 at 1080p.

The five-job arithmetic

A 9-second job at 768p lists at 9 x $0.30 = $2.70, which becomes $3.375 after the 1.25 margin and rounds up to $3.38. Five of those are $16.90, slightly more than the unrounded $16.875, because rounding happens per job.

A presenter test that stays cheap

The goal of a presenter test is to learn which face holds attention, not to ship five finals. Run all five at 768p, the default. Compare completion rate or click-through on the platform you buy on. Only the winner earns a 1080p run, which adds $5.07 for that one presenter instead of $25.35 for all five.

The ad is the same in every variant, so the soundtrack, camera move and cuts are the same too. That is what makes the comparison fair: only the person changes.

• One source video, uploaded once, reused for five jobs.
• One photo per job when the ad has a single on-screen person.
• Same prompt, or none, in every job.
• Recast has no seed field, so a repeat run of the same input can differ; store the variant you pick.

Limits that apply

A 9-second source is inside the 5 to 30 second window and far from the 15-second single-shot limit. If your master is 8.2 seconds it bills as 9. Photos are free, from 1 to 4 per job, and the number of photos never changes the price, so a two-person ad costs the same as a one-person ad of the same length.

Choosing the five faces

Five variants only teach you something if they differ on one dimension. Pick presenters who differ on the thing you want to learn, such as age, gender or style of dress, and keep lighting and framing of the photos alike. If the photos have different quality, you are testing photo quality as much as the face. Name each job with its variant label in your own system, because the results come back as separate files. With a 9-second ad, each variant plays for under ten seconds, so give each at least a few thousand impressions before you read the numbers. The recast spend is small next to the media spend: $16.90 for the set.

After the test, keep the source video, the five photos and the prompt together, so that the winning variant can be re-run at 1080p without guessing which inputs were used. Rerunning the winner costs $5.07 at 1080p, a small fraction of the five-job test.