Starwars fx

[inperson]

Has anyone tried to make light sabers? Ive made some cool test stills and about 3 seconds of motion. Im just lookin for an easier way, if you know one. Heres what im doin:

I have one of those cool toy qui gon jinn sabers and made some modifications which looks decent for the handle, and I modeled a saber beam in 3dmax and applyed a glow filter to it. Next i lined it up with the handle fraaaame by fraaaaame and overlayed the it over the footage. Its looking pretty good but I only got done with 3 seconds and I worked on it about an hour and a half. Mabye for a 5 minute scene ill just have to take my time.

Has anyone else tried to make light sabers. Im curious to see what approach was takin.

Thanx

[CMB]

Hi there,
yes ive tried, did i succeed... you decide! www.karoo.net/cmbla/dm.zip
its a 6 or 7mg (i cant remember)
file that unzips to an asf format
you'll need windows media player to watch it

id be interested to see the foorage youve done...
let me know what you think of mine :O)

[RBryant]

Wow, that was really cool... you did put a lot of time into that... what did you film it with (VHS?) what did you capture it with (Rainbow Runner G and Media Studio?) And what did you use to make it an .asf? Thanks for all the answers, I just got started in the desktop video thing and I'm tired of my files being 100+ megs

RBryant

[inperson]

Thats a cool video. I'll post a link here when Im finished with mine.
What apps did you use?
Did you have to do it frame by frame?

[CMB]

hi, thanks for saying kind things!

It started out as a mess around, and then i just played with it for a bit
the most annoying part fot he whole thing was trying to trackdown the sabre soundfx do you know how hard isolated effects (no background music or speech) are to come by :O)

filemd with a hi-8 camera which was one of my last projects incidentaly it died earlier this week, so i think its DV8 for me soon :O)

caotured with a marvel G200, and edited with Ulead Media Studio Pro 5.2

the effects where done with video paint,
just paint them over whatever your using for sabres.. the darth maul sabre was a proper one and the jedi's sabre was a half a steel washing pole thing i 'borrowed' from the garden :O)

to make it an asf, i created a final Mjpeg of it (about 250mg) and then used on demand video producer downloadable from microsft.com
i forget the exact url but if you follow the links from this site to
"this_idiots desktop video"
go sniffing round his avi showcase area and the link is somewhere around there

its a small program from microsoft that lets you load in files and then save tem as streaming media.. (otherwise known by microsoft as .asf)

you have to fiddle with the settings but when you do you can can good results as youve seen :O)

i hope ive helped you in someway :O)
any other questions just ask :O)

id love to see what you've shot/made sometime