[Simon Ender]

The thing is, that I don’t have to track a point that moves within a certain area. What I did is the following: I created the illumination the lightning causes on the cloud footage (approx. 10000*2500px) by the means of an animated turbulence. Now I have clouds that are randomly illuminated over time (1-2 frames each time). The only thing that is missing is the lightning strike. And since the sequence is more than 1500 frames in duration I want the start point of the ‘advanced lightning’ filter of AE to automatically place itself in the/an illuminaed area/s which are the areas with the highest value. The end point would than have to be offset accordingly via a simple expression.

I’d appreciate any hint on that. But maybe I have to do it manually. It’s just that one would think that it is kind of an easy thing for some plugin or filter to find the brightest spot/s and output the position.

Thank you,
Simon

[Simon Ender]

Thanks for your reply. I tried something like that, the problem is, the footage has 25 Megapixel resolution and the tracker freaks out, when I crank up the search area that big.
Finding the brightest spot(s) in an image is such a simple thing, I think there must be a way to get the position of those areas. Image Lounge’s “Highlight Selection” plugin finds all that spots an makes twinkles where they are, but I can’t figure out how to get/reveal the data it uses.

Simon