well...that was a 4 second clip. It had about 170 frames to it, which needed to be masked individually! Once I masked one saber, gaussian blurred it countless times and changed colour levels....I then had to repeat the whole process for the red saber, and apply the same blurs and levels. We are talkin about 2-3hrs for that. I once entered a rotoscoping competition on Theforce.net, which was a shot from Phantom Menace, so I had to repeat the process 3 times, as it had qui-gon, obi wan and darth maul in it...sigh....

I use a tutorial off the net to do this, and it's a case of making it a filmstrip file in premiere, then photoshopping it. I dont think it needs any plugins, only 3 layers, one for a tight aura, one for a loose aura and one for the core. Simply building up layers of Gaussian blur and changin the colour levels for the saber. Sounds easy, but it takes ages if your not photoshop savvy.

The reason why the blur is filtering into other frames, is due to the gaussian blur going over the frame and finishing in another. Once I have changed the levels, photoshop doesnt know that it's going over into another frame, so it doesnt cancel out the mask in other frames, thus the annoyin marks at the edges of the screen *god i hope this makes sense*

If anyone wants the tutorial to do this, let me know and i'll find it, and post it on here. Just a note, if rotoscoping, I recommend learning it in Adobe After Effects as it's supposed to me 10 times faster, due to the keyframing, but I havent got my head around it, so i'll stick with photoshop for now.

I'll stop muttering on now. Lol...far too much to read for one nite!