A 3-minute YouTube Short from 30-second clips: Wan 3.0 vs Seedance 2.5

A 3-minute YouTube Short built from six 30-second clips costs $22.80 on Sume with Wan 3.0 at 720p, including the $0.30 Timeline render, and $104.30 with Seedance 2.5 at the same tier. YouTube now allows Shorts up to three minutes, and the longest clip either model makes on Sume is 30 seconds, so this length needs six clips joined.

The platform rule

YouTube's help page says Shorts can be up to three minutes in length, and that a square or vertical video qualifies. It also says a Short over one minute with an active copyright claim is blocked globally and cannot be monetized. For a generated, music-free Short that matters less, but it is one reason to avoid dropping licensed music into the Timeline job.

The render step

Sume's Timeline job joins an audio spine and ordered video slots into one MP4, billed at $0.10 per output minute, rounded up. A 180-second spine is three minutes, so $0.30. The audio duration can run from 1 to 1,800 seconds, and the job takes 1 to 200 video slots, so six clips are well inside the limits. See the Timeline page for the slot fields and transitions.

The cost to watch is rerolls. A bad clip among six means regenerating one 30-second slot, which is $3.75 on Wan 3.0 or $17.334 on Seedance 2.5, not the whole Short.

Which to pick

Seedance 2.5 costs 4.62 times Wan 3.0 per second at 720p. For a 3-minute Short that is $81.504 extra. Spend it only if a side-by-side on one scene shows a gap your audience will notice. Aspect ratio: generate at 9:16 so the Short stays vertical.

The platform page is YouTube's Shorts help article; read it before upload, since length rules have changed before.

• Six 30 s clips, one Timeline job.
• Reroll single slots, not the whole video.
• Keep licensed music out of anything over one minute.

Reproduce the numbers

Every Sume price on this page comes from the public catalog at https://api.sume.com/v1/catalog, which needs no API key. Fetch it, find the row for the job or model named in the table, and multiply by your own seconds, characters or image count. Sume bills the list price shown in that row, so the catalog figure is the one that applies to your balance.

Vendor figures were read from YouTube Help: Shorts up to 3 minutes on 2026-10-09 and are the vendor's to change. Where a vendor page did not show a number, this page leaves it out instead of guessing, and any assumption that is ours is labeled as one.