Make a Top 5 vertical video from five stills with Sume Timeline

A Top 5 Short is five still images held for equal slots on a silent Timeline, then captioned. On Sume that is one POST /v1/timeline-1.0/render with audio.mode: "silence" and five video[] slots, followed by one video captions job. A 30-second list costs $0.10 for the render, since Timeline bills ceil output minutes at $0.10, plus the $0.20 caption job. Prices read from the Sume docs on 2026-10-06.

How do I lay out the five slots?

Six seconds each fits 30 seconds. video[0].start must be 0 and later starts must increase, so the starts are 0, 6, 12, 18 and 24. Stills are static holds: the job accepts a motion field but ignores it and reports motion_ignored, so do not plan a zoom on a photo. If you want movement, generate a short clip from the image first and use that clip as the slot.

import json

stills = [f"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/pick{i}.jpg" for i in range(1, 6)]
body = {
    "audio": {"mode": "silence", "duration_seconds": 30},
    "video": [{"source_url": u, "start": i * 6, "duration": 6,
               "fit": "cover"} for i, u in enumerate(stills)],
    "output": {"width": 1080, "height": 1920, "fps": 30},
}
print(json.dumps(body, indent=2))

What about the numbers on screen?

Timeline has no text layer. Put the ranking in the captions job: one cue per slot such as #5 ..., timed to the same six-second boundaries. Cues are limited to 400 characters each, 200 cues and a 60-second video, so a 30-second list is well inside the limits.

What does it cost?

Run the unbilled plan call first to confirm billable_minutes is 1.