Building on the earlier suggestion, Descript Creator Plan is a decent option for captions and transcription. It stays stable with 4K files. TL;DR: Descript delivers on speed without the usual glitches.

I totally feel your pain with the corporate grind! I was drowning in wedding edits last summer until I overhauled my pipeline with some actually useful AI stuff. It is amazing how much better things get when you stop fighting the built-in tools and use specialized plugins that actually leverage your GPU properly. It saved my sanity and my profit margins tbh! Since you are on a budget, these are the heavy hitters I use for 4K stuff:

• Runway Gen-2 Pro Subscription for their rotoscoping tool... it is legit magic for masking complex backgrounds in seconds.
• Waves Audio Clarity Vx Pro Plugin is way better than the Premiere noise removal, no underwater artifacts at all.
• Topaz Labs Video AI v4 Software for when the raw footage is grainy or soft. Most of these have trial versions so you can test them on that startup project before committing. Seriously, that Waves plugin is a one-time purchase usually on sale for like $40, so it wont blow your $100 monthly limit! You are gonna crush that deadline.

Would love to know this too

I have been looking for the same thing for my own corporate gigs and honestly, the current landscape is mostly disappointing. I have had issues with several tools that were supposed to be game-changers but they just werent as good as expected. Most of them struggle hard with 4K and just create more work in the long run. To see which of the more reliable tools might actually work for your Chicago gig, I need a bit more context:

• What are your actual rig specs, specifically the GPU and how much VRAM are you working with?
• Do you need tools that function as plugins inside Premiere or Resolve, or are you okay with external software for things like masking? Ive found that most of the hype-beast AI stuff crashes under real pressure... its better to be cautious before subbing to anything.

Caught this a bit late but man, I totally feel your pain with the corporate grind! I stayed up way too late last night messing with some cloud-based processing because my local rig just couldnt handle the heavy lifting. I am not 100% sure if the tech is fully there for 4K wedding stuff yet, but I think I heard from a buddy that those browser-based editors are actually insane for captioning now. Apparently they use some kind of server-side GPU acceleration? Honestly, it is kinda wild how much faster it felt than my desktop setup! I have been hearing that some of these tools are starting to use depth maps for rotoscoping instead of just edge detection, which sounds amazing for messy footage. I am still trying to figure out if it actually holds up in a real production environment tho... Not sure, but it might be the way to go for those crazy fast social media turnarounds! Love seeing the progress even if it is still a bit of a wild west situation right now!

Huh interesting. I had no idea. The more you know I guess 🤷