720p 3-minute YouTube Short: 112.5 MB at 5 Mbps, render 720x1280

Short answer

YouTube's recommended SDR bitrate for 720p is 5 Mbps at 24 to 30 fps and 7.5 Mbps at 48 to 60 fps, which puts a 180-second video stream at 112.5 MB and 168.75 MB (read 2026-10-05). In Sume, set output.width to 720 and output.height to 1280 on the timeline render. The price does not depend on resolution.

Why render below 1080p

The YouTube Shorts help page lists 1080p as the maximum resolution for Shorts (read 2026-10-05), so 1080x1920 is the top of the useful range and 720x1280 is one step below it. A smaller render helps when you move many episodes around, keep an archive, or upload over a slow link. It costs you sharpness on large screens, so do not drop to 720p for a Short with fine text.

Timeline 1.0 accepts even output.width and output.height values from 256 to 2160, so 720 and 1280 are both valid. If you omit output, the default is 1080x1920.

The 720p arithmetic

Megabits per second times 180 seconds, divided by 8, in decimal megabytes. Audio is 384 kbps stereo, the figure on the same encoding page.

The request body

Only the output block changes. This plan body is a 180-second silent spine with three 60-second slots at 720x1280. Plan calls are unbilled and need no Idempotency-Key. Swap in your own media.sume.com URL.

Sume does not let you pick a bitrate, so the table is the ceiling you would plan for, not a setting. Check the real file size after the render and before you upload.

For a season, the saving adds up. Twelve 180-second episodes at 1080p and 8 Mbps are about 12 x 188.64 = 2,263.68 MB of upload. At 720p and 5 Mbps they are 12 x 121.14 = 1,453.68 MB, which is 810 MB less. If an episode contains small text or a detailed product, render that episode at 1080x1920 and keep the rest at 720x1280, since each render is its own job with its own output block.

import json, os, urllib.request

key = os.environ.get("SUME_API_KEY", "")
if not key:
    raise SystemExit("set SUME_API_KEY")
src = "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/ep1.mp4"
body = {
    "audio": {"mode": "silence", "duration_seconds": 180},
    "video": [{"source_url": src, "start": i * 60, "duration": 60}
              for i in range(3)],
    "output": {"width": 720, "height": 1280},
}
req = urllib.request.Request(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/plan",
    data=json.dumps(body).encode(),
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + key,
             "Content-Type": "application/json"},
)
print(json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(req)))

Cost

A 180-second output is 3 billable minutes at $0.10, so $0.30 at 720p or 1080p. The docs describe the rate per output minute with no resolution term. Confirm it in GET /v1/catalog before you budget a season.

A final point on audio: the 384 kbps stereo figure on YouTube's page is a recommendation, and the audio share is small, 8.64 MB of a 121.14 MB total. Resolution is where the saving is, so do not trade away audio quality to shrink the file. If the episode is a talking head, a clean voice at 720p is a better trade than a muffled one at 1080p.