Thanksgiving take-home meals: a reheating video for $0.33 on Sume

A heat-and-serve video for take-home Thanksgiving meals can be four stills, a 600-character voice-over, one Timeline render and one caption job with authored cues. On Sume that is about $0.33. Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26, 2026, the fourth Thursday of November (Wikipedia, read 2026-10-11), so the clip needs to be in the pickup bag or the order confirmation by Wednesday.

The angle is not selling. Shops that sell cooked meals get calls on Thursday afternoon asking how long to warm the turkey. A short video attached to the receipt answers that question once, in the same words, in the same order.

What should the four cards say?

The USDA guidance, as returned by a web search on 2026-10-11, is to refrigerate perishable food within 2 hours, reheat leftovers to 165 degrees Fahrenheit checked with a food thermometer, and use most cooked leftovers within 3 to 4 days. Those are the three facts worth burning in as text. Your own reheating times (oven temperature, minutes per pound, how to loosen foil) come from your kitchen, not from this post.

Shoot or reuse four stills: the packed tray, the thermometer in the dish, the oven with the tray in, and the leftovers in a shallow container.

• Card 1: Keep it cold until you heat it, with your own oven setting.
• Card 2: Heat to 165 F in the middle, check with a thermometer.
• Card 3: Chill leftovers within 2 hours of serving.
• Card 4: Eat leftovers within 3 to 4 days.

How is it built and what does it cost?

Timeline 1.0 takes one audio spine and ordered video[] slots, and stills are allowed as static holds. Import the four photos and the voice file to your workspace first, then render one 40-second MP4 with four 10-second slots. Rendering is $0.10 per output minute, rounded up, so the render is $0.10.

The voice-over is Sume text-to-speech at $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, so 600 characters is $0.0285. Then burn the card text with video captions in cues mode, which takes text, start and end per cue and needs no speech recognition. That job is a flat $0.20 for clips up to 60 seconds.

Does the voice and the text need to match?

Yes. If the narrator says 165 and the card says 160, a customer will notice. Write the four cue lines first, then write the voice script from them, and change both in one commit. Because captions are a separate job, correcting a card means re-running a $0.20 job, not the render.

Run the Timeline plan endpoint before the real render. It is unbilled and returns the planned duration and billable minutes, which should say one minute here.

When should it go out?

Attach the video to the order confirmation, not the Thursday morning text. People look for reheating instructions when they are unpacking the bag. One clip per meal size is rarely needed: the temperature and the 2-hour rule do not change with the size of the bird.

After Thanksgiving, keep the file and reuse it for a Christmas pickup by changing the oven line and re-burning the cues.