How do I make lightsabers on a home video I’ve shot?

Probably the #1 question on this board after “When is (fill in the blank) coming out?”

i. Capturing

Well, the first thing you need to be able to do is get your footage into your computer. If you have an analog camcorder (the kind with the big VHS tapes), you are going to need a capture card. These cards run anywhere from $150--$1200 depending on the model and how robust they are.

If you have a DV or miniDV (DV = Digital Video) camera, you will need a Firewire port on your computer. Firewire is the trademark name of the Apple Computer corporation for the IEEE-1394 data transfer standard, also called i.Link by Sony; however, like “Xerox,” “Kleenex,” “Band-Aid” and a handful of other such terms, Firewire has come to be used almost universally as the generic term for the transfer standard.

Apple Firewire and most desktop PCs use the 6-pin Firewire port standard; Sonys and many digital camcorders use a smaller, 4-pin standard. It is up to you to figure out what you have.

If you do NOT have Firewire but DO have a digital camera, purchase a PCI Firewire card for your computer.

With your capture card will likely be packaged capturing software. You will need to read the manuals to figure out how exactly they work to get footage onto your computer.

Now the footage is on your computer and we can begin.

ii. Rotoscoping and Tutorials

There are many different methods for the creation of the lightsaber glow on a video file, most of which employ a process called rotoscoping. The rotoscope is a device, patented by animator Max Fleischer in 1917, to project live-action footage, one frame at a time, onto an animator’s drawing board; the style that resulted from this process became the trademark Fleischer Studios animation style.

Like Kleenex and Firewire, “rotoscoping” has come to mean any frame-by-frame alteration to footage, although the actual rotoscope device has since been abandoned in favor of computer workstations. Don’t let the way it is used on this board convince you that it applies only to the creation of lightsabers.

The most popular programs for this process on video are as follows:

Adobe AfterEffects (AE): By far the most popular method to date in Adobe AfterEffects is the one developed by Ryan_W and Link64PD, which you can find here.

A lesser-known, somewhat older tutorial by Maul316 can be found at this site. It requires the glow plugin in the AE production bundle, which not everyone is likely to have, but the first part that describes the mask-creation process is invaluable, as the method above has great glows, but skims over the roto process a little too fast for some people to understand.

Also available is a tutorial by Crew of Two, makers of Duality. Their recipe requires Commotion, but a combination of these three methods should yield some impressive results.

Adobe Photoshop (PS; in conjunction with Adobe Premiere):

Although Photoshop was developed more for single images, it can work with filmstrip files (which can be exported only from AE or Premiere) or TIFF sequences (numbered sequences of frames in separate full-resolution files).

One of the oldest tutorials available, and still getting good results, is the tutorial developed by Darel Finley, of Matrix Jedi fame.

(NOTE: His tutorial shows the filmstrip running horizontally, but by default in most versions of Photoshop the filmstrip will be displayed vertically; 35mm instead of VistaVision. wink )

The tutorial that preceded his groundbreaking AE method, Ryan_W’s Photoshop tutorial (the second one down the page) was the first to use the Gaussian Blur/color balance method of creating a glow, and when used in conjunction with the aforementioned filmstrips or TIFF sequences, can create some formidable effects.

Also a possibility is the Lightsaber Ignition Action (LIA+). Designed mainly for still frames, it is more difficult to get a good video clip of the effect with this method, though not impossible.

Ulead MediaStudio Pro: Used by the original Saber Master, Clay Kronke, Ulead is a powerful editing package capable of producing stunning effects. Check out his tutorial, which is probably the closest thing possible to computerized rotoscoping.

All these methods/tutorials expect a certain degree of familiarity with the program at hand, so make sure and at least skim the manual.

Also, to fairly represent some of the various possibilities:

AlamDV: While many dislike this program, the price is right for a fan filmmaker’s budget, and in the hands of a good artist some pretty nice results can come of it. Check out their site for more info.

Do I really have to do this thing frame-by-frame?

Yes. If you want good results, there’s no way around it. Some of the abovementioned programs like AE and Commotion support keyframing, in which the computer calculates motion between frames, but often the very precise calculation does not match the less precise organic motion of the clip and requires adjustment.

There have been talks of writing a computer program to identify a color in the scene and make it glow automatically, but this idea is fraught with practical issues.

A fast-moving saber will blur a great deal, becoming more transparent and thus, essentially, almost a different color. There are a number of other problems as well that make this a nice dream, but an impractical one for good results.