Draft at 480p, finish at 1080p: ten drafts and a final on Sume

Ten 480p drafts and one 1080p final of a 5-second Wan 3.0 clip cost $4.38 on Sume, against $13.75 for running all eleven at 1080p. That is a 68 percent saving, and it only holds if a 480p draft tells you enough to choose the prompt.

The arithmetic

Wan 3.0's billed rate doubles with each resolution step: $0.0625 a second at 480p, $0.125 at 720p and $0.25 at 1080p. A 5-second clip is therefore $0.3125, $0.625 or $1.25.

Where the plan breaks

A 480p draft shows composition, motion and prompt adherence. It cannot show fine detail, text legibility or skin texture, and a prompt that looks right at 480p can fail at 1080p. Re-running the final also does not reproduce the draft: the video docs say no v1 model accepts seed, so a 1080p run is a new sample, not an upscale of the draft.

A rule for how many drafts

Drafts pay for themselves only up to a point. At 480p a draft costs a quarter of a 1080p run, so four drafts equal one final. If you expect to need more than three tries to get a usable clip, drafting is cheaper; if the first 1080p usually works, drafting adds cost. Track your own first-try rate over ten clips and decide from that.

The same logic applies to duration. Test a 2-second version of an idea, since Wan 3.0 accepts clips from 2 seconds. A 2-second 480p draft costs $0.125 billed.

Rules of thumb

• Use drafts to choose a prompt, not a clip. Expect the final to differ.
• Budget one extra 1080p run in case the first final disappoints: that is $1.25 more.
• If detail matters in the final, test one 1080p early; the cost of finding out at the end is higher.