Just curious, I know making a lightsaber glow is pretty easy. I was wondering if anybody knew how to do it though, and if it's possible to do it FCP, or Adobe P. thanks.

You can make them with After Effects(probly your best choice), Photoshop, Mainvision(or if your computer runs below Windows XP you could get the freeware version of Mainvision, called Axogon composer). As for the programs you asked, i have no experience with them but would guess that you cannot make the sabers directly on them since they are primarily NLE's. Hoped that helped. Oh, and for learning how to make them check out TF.N(The Force.Net), it's a site for Star Wars fan films that has some tutorials for adding lightsabers to your video.

here ya go

http://www.good-tutorials.com/search.php?q=lightsaber


this site will help if u have adobe photoshop. it might help with premeire because they use pretty much the same filters. other than that, idk how to help ya.

It's totally possible in FCP, just not as easily as AE.

In short, make the glow as a PSD or PNG or whatever, layer it over your video, move the anchor point to the beginning of the blade where it comes out of the hilt, set the mode to add and keyframe, using rotation and position.

M. Night wanted to know what PNG was, so...

PNG is a lossless (no compression artifacts) format for graphics, it has built in transparency, like an alpha channel, and is quite useful. You can export and import it in most apps.

PNG at the Wikipedia

Just to add to Perry's great advice, use lots of motion blur (under the motion tab in FCP) on the lightsaber layer. Also, you may have to do more than rotation and position changes. As the lightsabers moves and tilts away from the camera, they will get shorter and longer and fatter and skinnier. You can use the distort function (also under the motion tab) to match the z-depth and perspective.

all the best

hi everyone.i just made a lightsaber a few days back on photoshop n ya it looks really cool.but if u want to do it on motion(video) ur best bet wud be to use after effects.otherwise u will have to sit n paint frame by frame in photshop.so dats like for a 4 second lightsaber sequence u will need to paint around 100 frames.also one more thing try n recreate the effect n use it in ur own way.rite now i am thinking of using the same effect in a different way.

thanks joren, i forgot about motion blur the problem is, FCP doesn't do blur very well.

I've always used premiere to make a filmstrip, import into Photoshop, then rotoscope it with Photoshop, because Photoshop is so powerful. Or any simply looking to make a lightsabre in a picture? Because that really is easy to do in PS.

I am a user of this product and member of the community at this place. Both are great.

http://fxhome.com/effectslab/overview.html