Three sale-day cuts of one hero clip: trims, Timeline, captions, $1.02

Three sale-day cuts of one hero clip, for Black Friday on November 27, Cyber Monday on November 30 and Giving Tuesday on December 1, cost $1.02 in Sume usage: $0.34 per cut for two trims, one Timeline render and one caption job.

The point is that a sale-day variant rarely needs new footage. It needs a different order, a different offer line and a new end card, and those are cheap edits.

Cost per cut

Video trim takes a [start, end) range of one Sume-hosted clip into a new MP4 and is reserved at $0.02 per job. Timeline renders at $0.10 per output minute, rounded up, so a short cut is $0.10. Standalone captions are $0.20 for a video of up to 60 seconds. Each cut here uses two trims, such as the product reveal and the close-up, so the per-cut cost is 2 × $0.02 + $0.10 + $0.20 = $0.34.

What changes in each cut

Keep the hero shot and change the story around it. Black Friday leads with the price. Cyber Monday leads with the delivery date and a free-shipping line. Giving Tuesday leads with the cause or the gift-with-purchase. Because captions are authored cues, not speech, the offer text can differ in each cut even though the footage is the same.

Do the order of operations the same way every time: trim first, render the Timeline, caption last. The caption job needs the final video, and a re-caption after a price change costs $0.20 without touching the earlier steps.

What it does not cover

The $1.02 assumes you already have the hero clip. A 10-second hero clip at 720p on Omni Flash 1.1 is $1.25, so including it brings the total to $2.27. It also assumes your offer copy is ready; a wrong price in a burned-in caption means a re-burn for $0.20 a cut.

If you need the clips in more than one aspect ratio, render the Timeline at each output size, since one Timeline render has a single width and height. That doubles the render line, not the trims.

Run order

• Import the hero clip as a Sume-hosted asset, since Timeline and trim refuse off-host URLs.
• Trim the reveal and the close-up with exact precision if cuts must land on a frame.
• Render with POST /v1/timeline-1.0/render and an Idempotency-Key per cut.
• Caption the finished MP4 with the sale-day offer text.