Source too long? The 1800 s and 300 s caps for each Sume media tool

Sume's media tools do not share one length limit. Video trim, audio detach and video inspect accept a source of up to 1800 seconds (30 minutes). Video filter, video frames and timeline compose stop at 300 seconds (5 minutes). A 40-minute recording fails on all of them, and a 12-minute clip works for trim and detach but fails on filter and frames. The error code tells you which cap you hit.

The caps side by side

Order of operations for a long recording

The cheap rule is to cut first and process second, because trim is the only tool with the long source window. Take a 25-minute screen recording and a vertical 90-second Short as the goal.

• Trim a range of at most 300 s from the recording with start and duration. Trim is $0.02 per job.
• Pass the new media.sume.com MP4 to video filter for the crop. It is under the 300 s cap now.
• Extract stills from that same trimmed file with video frames, which has the same 300 s cap.
• Assemble on Timeline 1.0 if the Short has more than one cut.

The 900 s output trap

Trim and detach both read 1800 s but write at most 900 s. A request for duration: 1200 is refused with video_trim_range_empty even though the source is long enough. If you need the whole 30 minutes as audio, detach it in two ranges and join them with timeline audio concat, which allows up to 20 parts.

{
  "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/recording.mp4",
  "start": 1260,
  "duration": 90
}

Reading the warning

Video frames adds a low_confidence_long_video warning when the source is longer than 90 seconds. It does not fail the job. It exists because the probe result is reused on longer clips, so check that the frame content matches what you expected before you rely on it.