Crimson FX, add Star Wars light saber effects to your QuickTime movies or DV streams
Crimson FX is an effect generator for Quicktime movies and DV streams designed to make adding laser and light blade effects (and possibly other effects) as easy as possible.
I decided to write Crimson FX after reading a posting on BoingBoing about how to create rotoscoped Light Saber effects. Unfortunately, it required quite a chunk of expensive and complicated software to do it. I figured not everybody who would want to make their own home-rolled laser and light saber effects would have access to those fine programs, so I sat down and hacked this out. Fortunately, I was able to re-use a lot of code I’d written over the course of a couple of years. It took me just a few days to get a working copy. Then I got busy with work and life and forgot about it.
It’s kind of hard not to remember something like this with all the Star Wars hoopla right now, however. The source code is available with no restrictions; Feel free to use it, modify it, remix it, whatever! If you do something cool with it, I’d love to see what you’ve created!
