Hi Ross, thanks for your response.
So I think the problem stemmed from my not trusting the software to do its own thing when I chose “Track in Moch AE” from the Animation menu in AE. When it was importing the clip, it asks for a frame range. For my clip, it said 0 to 1500 or something, but I only wanted 295 to 353, so I changed the import range.
Later I realized that leaving it alone imported the whole clip, but auto-set the in/out points to my desired range and everything worked perfectly fine.
So I was just making some wrong assumptions!