I build all of my own lightsaber props out of aluminum stock using metalworking tools including a lathe and mill. You would need training and experience on such machinery to build these sorts of props, and if you are just getting into it, you're better off either going simpler and making a prop from hardware store parts, or paying someone who makes saber props for a business.

Lightsabers from the Big Yellow Box is a site which has instructions on how to build some very inexpensive lightsaber props from materials available almost everywhere.

Parksabers.com is a business that sells very sophistocated lightsaber props (mostly with EL blades) and now has a few stunt saber models that can be used for dueling. They say to allow 12-14 weeks from the time of ordering.

RandomSabers.com is another place that makes sabers built for fighting, and does custom designs, though I have heard they also take several months.

For those who need footage to practice lightsaber rotoscoping on, below is a link to a clip of the first set of Ryan vs Dorkman without any effects applied:

Most of the effects in the clip are done with Trapcode's "Particular" plug-in for After Effects. You can download a free fully-functional (watermarked) demo version to try and learn for yourself. There are many presets to dissect, and helpful info on Trapcode's Support Page.

The explosive sparks in the middle are a particle system spewing out spheres in "Bounce" mode, colliding with a plane positioned to emulate the ground. The lightning effects are created by firing several invisible particles per second through a turbulence air field, each of them with an auxilary system dumping thousands of visible particles per second behind them, creating the illusion of a streak. The turbulence field can be used to affect the size of the particles, as well as the position, to add some variance to the shape of the streaks.

For all of these effects, I created them as white particles that I then used to generate glows on for final compositing, similar to lightsabers. (basically duplicating that generated layer several times and blurring each layer more and more, setting them to screen and applying a color balance to them before adding/screening them onto the plate)

In these cases, you will film 2 or 3 things. All of these should be filmed on a tripod, with the camera not moving at all. The first is your action plate, where the actors perform and pretend to loose their limb. The second plate is the background plate ("clean plate") where the camera should not move at all from the first plate. You want the video to be exactly the same, just without actors. Moving things in the background like cars or trees blowing, etc will not work. The third thing, depending on your shot, can be another action plate for the severed body part's motion. In the case of RvB, we filmed myself turning around and falling down, trying to emulate the motion I wanted my severed head to have as closely as possible.

The next step is the effects. Beginning where you want the limb cut off, you have to rotoscope it carefully. You can then duplicate the layer, and use the bottom one as the main action plate. Set it's mask to subtract, so that it "removes' the limb, leaving a hole in the footage. The layer above can have the mask set to add, so only the limb is visible. With both of these layers set like this, the footage will look normal. Underneath the bottom layer, you then place your clean plate, so that it will fill the hole left behind by your mask.

Now, you can set a keyframe for position/rotation/scale on the top layer (the "limb" layer) on the last frame it is connected to the body (the first frame you have rotoed). From there, you can keyframe it to fall off, or move however you want. You should enable motion blurring on that layer for the most realism (see your manual or help files for more info on that)

I capture footage through FireWire, and use Adobe After Effects for 99% of my effects work. Naturally, I rely heavily on Adobe Photoshop as well.

Well it depends a lot on how complex the fight is, how many sabers are in it and how dedicated you are to it.

Let's take Ryan vs. Dorkman for example. This project is about 5 minutes long involving 2 lightsaber blades in most shots, plus some other miscellaneous effects. Both Michael and myself worked on an about equal portion of the visual effects in our free time, taking a couple week break for the holidays. In the end, it took us roughly 4 months to complete the visual effects.

The floating lightsaber handle was done in two ways. For the wide, far away shot of the handle floating between us in our "force tug-o-war", the handle was an image of the handle (photographed on set) that I animated to wiggle around.

It's really a very makeshift setup all around. The harness we're using is actually one of my parents' old hang-gliding harnesses which is basically a padded belt with crotch straps and D rings on the sides. (we cut off the torso straps) I hope to purchase a real harness made specifically for wire stunts in the near future.

I used the Mac screen capture program Snapz Pro. A PC program designed to do basically the same thing is CamStudio. Mose similar softwares for Mac and PC can be found at Download.com by searching for "screen capture" and the like.

Basically, the ball is a series of cloud-like images that appear, grow, and fade out one on top of the other very rapidly. The deceleration and fading of the layers fakes the illusion of a 3D expulsion of gas. It was created in a very manual version of most sprite-based particle systems.

For my personal DV projects, I always edit and work in full screen DV (720x480) until it's finished. I then export a full size, no compression (100% DV 720x480) version of the project and import it into After Effects. There, I set up a composition to the same duration and framerate of the project, but at half the physical size (usually). I plug that big export into the composition and scale it down to 50.5% (.5 because it nicely trims off those thin black bars on the side of DV footage). Once the composition is all set up, it's time to export.