YouTube Studio draft feedback: measure pacing yourself with an API

The Made on YouTube announcements say Studio will give feedback on drafts covering pacing, structure, storytelling and more, on web and mobile. That feedback lives inside YouTube; Sume does not read it or reproduce it. What you can do before upload is measure the parts of pacing that are numbers: speech rate, silence and how often the picture changes.

What is stated, and what you can measure

The YouTube posts name the feedback categories but do not describe a scoring method or thresholds, so there is no target to hit. Treat your own numbers as comparisons between drafts of the same video.

Pull the transcript and stills in one call

Video inspect takes a Sume-hosted clip of up to 1800 seconds. With transcribe: true it adds Sume STT at $0.01 per audio minute, and segmentation.mode: sentence returns sentence segments. frames: {fps: 0.5} returns a still every 2 seconds, up to 24 per call.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-inspect \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: draft-pacing-001" \
  -d '{"video_url":"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/draft1.mp4","transcribe":true,"segmentation":{"mode":"sentence"},"frames":{"fps":0.5}}'

Turn it into a comparison

Words per minute is the transcript word count divided by the clip minutes. Run the same call on draft 1 and draft 2, then compare. The stills show whether the first 10 seconds reach the point; they also show whether the visual changes at least every few seconds, which is a judgment you make from the sheet rather than something the API scores.

If a draft is too slow, cut dead air with video trim and measure again. Keep the inputs identical so the comparison is fair.