Special Effect

Shoot-a

Hi can anyone help me by provivding info about creating a short lightsaber battle between two people.I know it involves rotoscoping but what is the easiest way etc

reece

Can be quite easy to do depending on the editing/graphics package that you get your hands on. I haven't used final cut express but I've been told that it can be done fairly quickly using it.

I've got adobe after effects professional which allows you to track motion points. I created a 23 second light saber scene on it in about 5 minutes.
If you happen to get your hands on a copy of it then do the following -
buy a toy lightsaber. Tape the bottom part of the beam one colour. tape the very top part of the beam the same colour. Use the beam effect - tracking motion on marked top part of the saber to beam start point. Create a new motion tracker for the beam end point tracked to the bottom mark on the saber. Set beam 3-d perspective off.

If you don't have access to these tools then you could be in for a lot of rotoscoping. Basically you'd have to draw white rectangles onto your saber and apply various blurs and outer and inner colour changes to the rectangles - on each frame. See if you can export your footage to film strip and import into adobe photoshop. There are dozens of websites that will talk you through the rotoscoping a lightsaber in photoshop. Using this technique I did a 10 second lightsaber scene in about 5 hours

decob

reece wrote:

If you don't have access to these tools then you could be in for a lot of rotoscoping. Basically you'd have to draw white rectangles onto your saber and apply various blurs and outer and inner colour changes to the rectangles - on each frame. See if you can export your footage to film strip and import into adobe photoshop. There are dozens of websites that will talk you through the rotoscoping a lightsaber in photoshop. Using this technique I did a 10 second lightsaber scene in about 5 hours

just one example of rotoscoping a lightsaber in afx http://misthe.freehostia.com/index.php?categoryid=8&p2_articleid=3

Deliverance

This is an excellent link and is a great tutorial I have added it to my favourites. Nice one.

M. Sean McManus

Check out this one:

http://www.videocopilot.net/videotutorials/saber2/index.htm

Deliverance

Another one for the favourites. Thanks Sean, great link, to think I used to spend hours trawling the net for tutorials and getting headaches trying to get one to work. My course work is going to get a huge leap next year:D