@Reply #3 - good point! Honestly, if you want to stop the manual grind, you gotta stop relying solely on Adobe for everything. I stopped doing my masking in Premiere months ago. I started using Runway Gen-2 AI Video for the heavy in-painting stuff and it works pretty well. It saves me so much time with the rotoscoping, even if it feels a bit weird at first. For cutting down my talking heads, I switched to Descript Storyboard v64 and it basically lets me edit audio like a text doc. It is so much faster for cleaning up those wedding promos. Adobe Sensei is fine for simple stuff, but it just cant handle the complex clips without getting all glitchy. Just keep your projects organized and you will be fine.

Late to the party, but stop overcomplicating it. Just grab Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 for the magic mask features. It beats masking in Premiere every time.

• Faster rotoscoping
• Better grading

Honestly, I used to struggle with that same burnout. Once I started relying on external tools for the heavy masking, my weekends finally opened up again. Be careful with those settings tho.

Had a moment to think about your stack! Are you shooting mostly on Sony or Canon? For noise, Topaz Labs Video AI is a total game changer for my 4K footage.

Honestly, I totally get where youre coming from. Six years of manual masking in Premiere will drain anyone. I finally hit a wall last year with a huge batch of wedding footage and realized my eyes were gonna give out if I didnt change something. I ended up switching to a workflow that relies heavily on text-based editing tools for the initial cuts, which saved me so much time since I dont have to scrub through every single second of raw audio anymore. It just feels way more natural to delete a sentence and have the timeline update itself. For the masking and object removal, I honestly stopped trying to force my main editing software to do all the heavy lifting. I started using dedicated cloud-based platforms for the masking tasks. You can basically just paint over the subject once and let the servers handle the frame-by-frame tracking. It isnt perfect every single time, but it gets me 95 percent of the way there, and that last five percent is just a quick cleanup. It really freed up my schedule so I could actually sleep before a deadline. Just dive into any of those web-based AI suites for the compositing stuff and you will be so happy you did. It feels like magic when it actually works, and honestly, for local promos, it is more than good enough.

Building on the earlier suggestion, I think you have a solid plan now. People mentioned a bunch of good software, but honestly, manual effort is usually the real bottleneck. TL;DR: Grab a specialized tool for masking and stop fighting the timeline. I personally find that automating the repetitive stuff lets me focus on the creative color work. It really is a game changer for meeting those tight deadlines.