In reference to the way you did your light saver in photoshop your mistake was doing the blur and stuff like that per each frame,
Basicly what you want to do, is do just 1 saber which will leave you with like 174 layers, hide the video layer then murge all that sabers layers into 1,
from there the blur effect will effect every single saber at once, do everything you want to do to make that one look right then duplicate the layer and remerge, basicly rasterizing the layer into a perma layer.
Then you can markey the space inbetween frames straights through inbetween each section of frames and delete the extra glow that bleeds or just use the eraser brush your choice.
After your done then redisplay the video layer and walla 1 ssaber down then get started on the second..
Also this is one more video i did, It was a video of some guys outside the movie theater waiting to see starwars, i tried this one because it wasnt a planned shot. And i wanted to see how it would come out, you can probily tell i put a little more work into this one though.
BTW intro done in After effects
www.compugears.com/masterposampleswlowres.wmv
and while yes AE is faster to keyframe, the effect isnt the same because you use a photoshop layer overlayed over the saber, Making the effect or motion blur a lot harder to reproduce along with the light on the light saber thinning out incorrectly.
Sad to say But they do it frame by frame at dream works for sabers. NOW LAZERs are a whole nothing story