mSaber
I'm a
geek and since I'm a geek, and in honor of the new Star Wars movie that came out around
Christmas time, I decided I was going to create that little lightsaber scene you saw with
my nephews using the plug in mSaber by MotionVFX. I'm going to talk about my review of it, which,
to be honest, will not entirely be filled with praise. In fact, this plug in frustrated
me way too much, and normally I am a fan of MotionVFX products. I'll start with the things
I was impressed with. I love all the options for the different colors of the light sabers.
Like I said before, you can choose whatever color you like and there's also some cool
preset options to choose from. I was also surprised at how realistic they made the light
fall off from the glow of light sabers. So it reflects off of areas in the shot very
realistically and makes it seem like you're actually holding a bright, glowing light saber.
Lastly, I was impressed with the accuracy of the motion trail of the light sabers. So
when my nephews would swing their toy light sabers, it creates a motion trail obviously
because I am shooting in 24 frames a second and mSaber did a great job of creating that
realistic cinematic motion blur for their light sabers. Most the time honestly it would
match up perfectly with the toy motion.
trail. Here are the reasons why I was really disappointed with the plug in and why if I
could go back, I would not buy it again. For one, whenever I would use my cursor to move
either the lightsaber end points or the keyframes for the mask, it would never be matched up
with my cursor, so I would try and move it a tad and it would end up way out of line
from where my cursor was. And this made it really hard to make precise adjustments and
was just incredibly annoying. Throughout this short little film I made a way to combat this
is by having the zoom option on when adjusting the light saber, but I didn't like this as
much because you couldn't see the lightsaber, so I wasn't able to line it up properly. I
thought the next reason this plugin was a disappointment was the masking and masking
proved to be an absolute nightmare. Took the most time and it was incredibly frustrating.
The keyframes didn't always save, so I go back a couple of frames in one or two keyframes
would be in a totally opposite direction and I thought I could combat this initially by
pressing every key frame and then pressing add keyframes so maybe they would all save,
but sometimes that didn't even work. In saying that if you are planning on using this plugin
to animate a fight scene or clips where your lightsaber will be going behind something
and end up being blocked, then prepare to spend way too much time on masking.
I like to think I'm somewhat proficient at knowing how to mask things on my editing software,
but for example, with this one clip of 1.83 seconds, I ended up spending 1 hour and 50
minutes just on this plugin just on the lightsabers, no joke. Also, the rendering time was pretty
bad for this plugin compared to other plugins I use, but I am working on a MacBook Pro,
so that may not be an issue for you guys. I'd say if you want to create a short little
clip with lightsabers with minimal visual blocking of the lightsabers, then this plugin
is top notch and looks realistic. However, if you are planning on creating a fight scene
or a longer film of some sort and you greatly value your time, then absolutely look for
an alternative. This was an incredible time waster. If you guys enjoyed this review then
it'd help me out if you guys would press the thumbs up on and comment below if you have
any questions about mSaber or my channel or anything in general. I hope you guys have
an amazing day and may the force be with you. Nerd!