What would be a good way to rotoscope lightsabers on interlaced video? Should I try to deinterlace it first and then rotoscope in Photoshop, and then reinterlace it? I would like to preserve the 60i framerate though. Can I rotoscope using the interlaced frames (with all their jaggies) and then just import it back into the video editor

I played around a bit with this just for fun.

What I did was to rotoscope onto every interlaced frame. If the light sabre is in full swing you will basically rotoscope a triangle onto the frame, that covers both interlaced fields. Of course this constitutes "cheating" in the sense that the rest of your footage will be 60i and your lightsaber will seem to be in "frame mode". The result looked fine for me though.

You may also use the force and wander into: http://www.theforce.net/theater

It is basically a huge Star Wars fansite and this particular area is populated by people who do little else but Star Wars fan films. Thus they have plenty of tutorials on the subject including who should have which colour light sabre :)

Good luck.

Hans Henrik

And one more thing...

Start by doing 2 seconds or so. Rotoscoping takes a loooong time but then at least it is boring too.

You would rather try with 2 seconds first, and then decide if it works for you, than do an entire scene, and then discover that you should have shot it in framemode...

Hans Henrik

Thanks a lot to all. I've done this before in frame mode but this time I didn't want to shoot the entire production in frame mode so I'm stuck with what I have. When I outputted the interlaced video to a 24p filmstrip in Premier it seemed to be fine, and then it imported back fine too. I might just do that.

I'm curious about other non-Photoshop means of doing this though. I have to look into that. Chroma keying is going to be very hard.

Ok. Another thing if you use filmstrips... If you add glow to the rotoscoped sabers, beware that they might "bleed" into the next frame. The separation in filmstrips is not that big, and I havent figured out how to make it bigger.

Hans Henrik

I know what you mean! It's a pain in the ass to be sure. :)

Check out AlamDV from http://www.csb-digital.com/

It's not very expensive and worth every penny.
I used it for several minutes of lightsabers in a video I did last year. It made the process much less painful than it is to do with photoshop.

I have a trailer with a bit of our lightsaber battle, but my video server is currently offline...

CSB has lots of demos however.

Good luck and have fun.