After effects: How can I track motion AFTER applying saturation?

Question

Disclaimer, I'm relatively new to After effects:

Here is the problem, I need to track this lens flare:

Its very hard to do, however my thought was to apply some color correction in order to make it more easily trackable. I did this by increasing the saturation and I think the effect would make the lens flare much easier to track;

Problem is when I now try to track motion, it wants to do so on the original footage rather than the footage with the color corrections. Can I not track the color corrected footage and then transplant the tracking data to the original footage?

Here is a gif showing the problem.

Answer 1

one way that I would get around this issue would be to render the footage with the saturation effect applied and then track the rendered footage and apply that tracking data for your original footage without the saturation effect.

You can also try plugins like Mocha which does amazing 2D planar tracking on difficult footage like these.

You can also refer to the document here: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/tracking-stabilizing-motion-cs5.html

Answer 2

How long is the clip? If it's short, maybe just do it manually, and use clone stamp or content aware fill to replace the grass? You'll probably have better results than trying to track something with lots of movement (grass) and lots of edges, as the edges are what the tracker uses to find its way.

If you do still want to track it as your question asks - you can apply the saturation to the clip, then pre-comp the clip. Apply the track to the original main comp (not inside the pre-comp), and it will use the saturated version to create the track. Then either remove the saturation setting once the track is good, or duplicate the video track and use that non-saturated version.