I wanted to give lightsaber ignition a shot so I put together a quick clip tonight (only took me 5 hours!)  To be honest I don't like how it turned out.  What I did was shoot about one minute of footage with out anything in the room.  Then I shot me with the saber right after that.  I used the empty room footage as a background plate and masked out the blade of the lightsaber.  When its time to ignite, I just animated the mask upward revealing the blade.  The reason(s) it looks hokey are

1) There is a slight variance in the lighting which makes the background plate look darker causing a rectangular patch of darkness to float around where the blade should be.

2) You can see a tiny bit of the glow near my hand before ignition.

I have some other minor quibbles like I wish I would have made a move to indicate I was igniting the saber.  Right now the only cue is the sound.  I also would have liked to mask out the fact that the blade passes over the lighting fixture not behind.  I'll have to look into how the ignition is done.  I can't imagine that they do a swap..that just seems goofy.  Anyway, aside from all that it is the first time I've held a lightsaber I am stoked about that :)

-Neil