Trim a 200-second take to a 180-second YouTube Short for 2 cents

To fit a 200-second take into a Short, send one video-trim job with start: 0 and duration: 180. It costs $0.02 and returns a new MP4. YouTube's help page says Shorts can be up to three minutes in length (read 2026-10-09), and 3 x 60 = 180 s.

The numbers

Trim limits come from the Sume video-trim docs; the Shorts length comes from YouTube's own help page.

Choose the cut point before you pay

Twenty seconds have to go. Cutting the tail is the simplest, but a pause or a cut of dead air at the start may be better. Use start: 8, duration: 180 if the first 8 seconds are throat clearing; the range must still sit inside the source, and end past the source is clamped with the warning trim_clamped_to_source.

Exact or keyframe

precision: exact is the default. It re-encodes with libx264 and yuv420p and is frame-accurate. keyframe copies the stream, and the cut can begin one GOP early. For a hard 180 s limit, stay on exact and read actual_start_seconds and duration_seconds in the result before you upload. Import the clip first with POST /v1/media-imports so it sits on media.sume.com, send an Idempotency-Key header, then poll GET /v1/jobs/:id/status and read GET /v1/jobs/:id/result. The API rejects off-host URLs at admit, so a bad URL fails before any work runs.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-trim \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: short-180-001" \
  -d '{"video_url":"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/take.mp4","start":0,"duration":180,"precision":"exact"}'

What Sume does not check

Sume does not know your channel, your claims, or the aspect ratio rules of the platform. The trim job only cuts. Check the result's duration_seconds against the limit yourself. The help page also covers vertical or square framing for Shorts, which a trim does not change unless you send output width and height (exact only, 256 to 2160).

Budget for a week of Shorts

If you publish five Shorts a week from longer takes, the trim bill is 5 x $0.02 = $0.10. If each also needs a second cut for another platform with a shorter limit, the bill is 10 x $0.02 = $0.20. The cost is small enough that the real constraint is review time, so read the result's duration_seconds and actual_start_seconds fields and store them next to the published video. Every media job follows the same lifecycle: submit with an Idempotency-Key, receive a job, poll GET /v1/jobs/:id/status until it is ready, then read GET /v1/jobs/:id/result. A retry with the same key does not queue a second job, so a network error during submit never doubles a charge.