I've also done Star Wars lightsaber rotoscoping and let me tell you, it is an evil and painfully slow process. If you are dealing in NTSC at 29.97 frames per second, that means you manually have to move/tween/tweak a lightsaber blade 30 times for every one second of video. That isn't even mentioning when the lines of the prop aren't clearly defined when in motion so it is harder to determine where the blade starts/stops. Then you also have masking for elements in front of the blade itself, which, if it is a person's hand or something small and moving, is also done frame by frame.

This is why all my work is done in 5 fps. ;)