Editing footage before working with it!

Ok so a lot of what i have been imersing myself in has talked about editing your footage before you take it into a piece of matchmoving software. I have done this twice without letting you know.

The benefit of doing this is that you are sometimes able to drag out a better track from just using one channel, or converting to a greyscale (or single channel) sequence. so far this has worked ok, however i have noticed somthing interesting:

by converting to a grey scale image, it creates a fine contrast of automatic tracks. most auto tracks will not pass 2 seconds, however you will now get one or two that run the full length of the footage or plate. This can be interesting when used with information taken of another plate.

ofcourse all this can then be discarded and you can revert back to your original colour footage for further editing when compositing with your 3d sequence.