YouTube Shorts: 3 minutes at 1080p, rendered as 180 s on Sume

A holiday gift-guide Short can run up to three minutes. YouTube's help page describes Shorts as "short-form videos that are up to 3 minutes long" and says you can upload Shorts at a maximum resolution of 1080p. In Sume, a Timeline render with audio.duration_seconds: 180 and the default 1080x1920 output bills ceil(180/60) = 3 minutes, which is $0.30 at the docs' public rate of $0.10 per output minute.

What is and is not on the page

The YouTube page I fetched states length and resolution. It does not state an aspect ratio, so I do not give one as a YouTube rule.

Steps

• Import all the clips and the voiceover file to Sume.
• Set audio.duration_seconds to 180 or less. Declared starts in video[] must begin at 0 and increase.
• Use transition only on slots after the first, with a type such as fade and a duration up to 1 second.
• Leave output unset for 1080x1920, or set it. Staying at 1080 wide matches the 1080p cap.
• Run the plan call, check billable_minutes is 3, and render.
• Upload on YouTube. The platform decides if it counts as a Short.

Renders past 12 slots are chunked automatically, per the Timeline docs, so a 40-clip gift guide is fine.

Pacing a three-minute gift guide

Three minutes is long for a Short, so structure matters. A common layout is a 5-second hook, then one segment per gift, then a closing line. With eight gifts, each segment gets roughly 20 seconds. In Timeline terms that is ten slots with increasing start values: 0, 5, 25, 45, and so on.

If you have a voiceover, use it as the audio spine. Set audio.duration_seconds to the length of the voiceover file and make sure the last slot ends no more than 0.5 seconds before the end of the spine, since the docs allow coverage to stop at most 0.5 seconds before it ends.

Add a soundtrack bed with duck_db so the music drops under the voice. That is the only audio mixing Timeline does, so settle the levels before you render.

Budget and detail

For a budget view, a 180-second render is $0.30, and ten gift guides are $3.00. Add $0.20 per 60 seconds of burned captions, which is $0.60 per guide, and any voiceover or music you generate on Sume at their own rates. The Timeline fee is the small part. Confirm the numbers in the catalog before you commit, because the docs treat their rates as public defaults and point to GET /v1/catalog for the live ones.

What Sume does not do

Sume does not upload to YouTube or set its Shorts classification, and I found no Sume tool that sets a platform disclosure label.