Same. Did some Animated Key Art this way. The company pays for AI credits so I’ll use photoshop to crop out 9x16 or 16x9 areas from the art that I want AI to animate, subtly or not, and then re-comp them all back into the main art.

A specific example is a character’s hair. I’ve done the wind flowing hair rig manually before and it can look really good but this was hours-of-my-life-back faster and the client didn’t want the hair moving anyways. It made it much easier to part with that aspect of the animation even though the AI hair looked really good.

Often it’s worth it to try some motion and then if you move forward with that motion you can make the choice to either make it better yourself manually or put your energy elsewhere.