Late to the party but I had a pretty rough experience trying to automate my last big project. My hopes were high for Runway Gen-3 Alpha Video Generation Model to be the magic bullet for rotoscoping because their online demos are wild, but unfortunately, it just didnt hold up for my 4K ProRes delivery. It felt super sluggish and I spent way more time cleaning up the messy AI masks than I would have just doing it the old fashioned way in my timeline. Testing out Descript Pro Annual Subscription with 30 Hours AI Transcription for captioning and audio cleaning was another mixed bag.

• Runway: The generative fill is cool for weird background stuff but it lacks the precision for high-end promos.
• Descript: The transcription is basically perfect but the actual video engine feels like a toy compared to Premiere. Honestly, these tools still feel like theyre in beta sometimes. Its frustrating when youre on a real deadline and the tech just fails you.

Ive been messing around with this stuff for a bit and honestly, some of it is actually useful and not just hype. Since youre on a deadline for those 20 promos, you probably dont want to overcomplicate things too much or buy stuff that breaks your timeline. These are the ones that actually stay in my workflow without crashing everything:

• Topaz Labs Video AI v4 for any noisy footage. It works wonders on 4K files but itll make your fans spin like crazy.
• Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Studio 19 specifically for the Magic Mask feature. Its basically AI rotoscoping that saves hours of manual clicking.
• Adobe Premiere Pro Creative Cloud Subscription for the auto-captioning. Its built-in now so no extra cost there. The Resolve Studio license is a one-time thing and totally worth it just for the AI audio isolation and masking tools. It plays nice with ProRes and wont eat your whole budget.

Wow ok that changes things. Gonna have to rethink my approach now.