YouTube Studio clip captions: color, font, position vs Sume design

Short answer

YouTube's Video Clips and Shorts tool in Studio adds autocaptions that you can customize in color, font, style and position. Sume's video captions API covers the same ground by tokens: colors, typography, placement, phrasing and motion. The difference is the font: on Sume's Latin styles the style picks the face, and the font field applies only to Hangul styles.

What Studio does

The Studio help page says you can cut segments by transcript, by timestamps or from AI suggestions, that autocaptions are added and customizable (color, font, style, position), and that the source video stays linked (read 2026-10-05). It adds that clipping your own content carries no penalty. AI suggestions are listed for 10 countries and 7 languages, so outside those the AI picks are not offered.

That is a hand-driven tool. It is the right place to make one or two Shorts. A script or agent that makes a clip every day needs an API.

Mapping the controls

The Sume column comes from the caption docs. Punch and tiktok-green do not support design overrides.

A request with overrides

This body burns the slam style with a cyan active color, a lower line placement and a narrower text width. Values outside the documented ranges return a 400 before any charge, so a wrong override fails at request time. The video must be a public HTTPS URL. Each accepted job is $0.20 for a video up to 60 seconds.

import json, os, urllib.request

key = os.environ.get("SUME_API_KEY", "")
if not key:
    raise SystemExit("set SUME_API_KEY")
body = {
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/clip.mp4",
    "style": "slam",
    "design": {
        "colors": {"active": "#22D3EE"},
        "placement": {"anchor_ratio": 0.72},
        "typography": {"safe_width_ratio": 0.8},
    },
}
req = urllib.request.Request(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions",
    data=json.dumps(body).encode(),
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + key,
             "Content-Type": "application/json",
             "Idempotency-Key": "caption-clip-001"},
)
print(json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(req)))

Which to use

Use Studio when you want AI suggestions on a long upload and you are in a listed country. Use Sume when the cut and the captions must be repeatable: the same design block on every clip in a series, one restyle with source_caption_id and no second transcription, and a job log you own. A common split is to let Studio pick moments and let a script apply the look you settled on.

One more difference is how you get the cut. Studio cuts by transcript, by timestamps or from suggestions, inside the product. With Sume the cut is a request: video trim takes a start and an end or a duration and returns a new clip, so the same list of timestamps from a spreadsheet can drive every cut. The captions then run on that clip, and a restyle with source_caption_id reuses the word timings, so changing the color on 20 clips does not mean 20 new transcriptions.

If your footage lives on YouTube already, remember that Sume works from media.sume.com artifacts and public HTTPS URLs for captions, not from a YouTube link. Download or export first, then import.