YouTuber's year-in-review video: 10 clips, 6 thumbnails, $1.18 on Sume

A YouTuber can build a 3-minute year-in-review from ten past videos for $1.175 on Sume: ten trims ($0.20), ten audio detaches ($0.10), a 3-minute Timeline render ($0.30), one music bed ($0.125) and six 16:9 thumbnail drafts ($0.45) (read 2026-10-03).

Year-end recaps tend to go up in the last two weeks of December, when channels post less and viewers look back. Starting in early December leaves time to pick the clips, and a nonlinear tool is not needed: Timeline takes an ordered list of slots.

Why you detach the audio

Timeline needs one audio spine: either a single file or up to 20 gapless parts. If your recap should keep each clip's own sound, trim each clip, detach the audio of each trimmed clip (a wav for $0.01), and pass those wavs as audio.parts[] with their durations. The video slots must cover the spine, so use the same start and duration for the picture. Ten parts is within the 20-part limit.

Set output.width to 1920 and height to 1080 explicitly. The default render is vertical 1080 by 1920, and a landscape recap needs the override. A 3-minute output bills as three render minutes at $0.10, so the render line is $0.30. Add the music as a soundtrack with duck_db so it sits under the speech from your clips; ducking works only because the spine is real audio, not silence.

Thumbnails and what you still do

Six drafts at medium quality let you test three ideas twice. Ideogram 4.5 renders quoted text, so keep the title to two or three words and proofread the spelling. The high quality is $0.275 per image after margin (list $0.22), so use medium for exploring and spend on one final only if the draft earns it.

You still choose the ten moments and the order, and a recap earns its views through that selection. Make sure you own or have licensed everything in the clips, including music playing in the background of old videos, because a recap re-publishes it. For more on testing options, see thumbnail variants with n set to 4.

Budget and checks before you start

Pick the ten moments by looking at your analytics for what viewers rewatched or commented on, then order them by month rather than by popularity, so the recap tells a year. A cold open with the best moment gives viewers a reason to stay for the rest.

If you want a version for Shorts, trim a 60-second cut from the same material and render it vertical: that is one more $0.10 render. Keep the project folder with clip names and the plan call result, so next year you can reuse the structure and only swap the clips.