: Converting a video of someone exercising into its animation equivalent I'm new here so please bear with me... I've gone through search results but i couldn't find quite what i was looking for.

@Vandalay110

For a repetitive exercise, you are in luck: you can optimize the heck out of it.

A "crunch" starts in position A, moves to position B, and then back to position A; repeat. For a simplified animation, you can refine this to A>B, REVERSE the animation B>A, and then repeat. For a crunch, A>B takes about 1 second. For interlaced video, you only need 30 frames, for progressive video, you need 60. (approximately)

You might try setting up a tripod with a 1080p camera. For a backdrop, use pure white and light the scene so the actor cast very little shadow. Clothe the actor in very solid colors and clothes which do not wrinkle or fold too much. Film some repetitions. Note that for this type of thing you can get away with fifteen frames per second or even using "sports rapid shutter mode" if your camera can support it. You will wind up with choppier animations but this may be acceptable depending on the style.

Extract the best sequence of frames that you can use to play forwards and back in the A>B<A manner. Take a few sample frames and experiment by converting to greyscale and adjusting using "threshold" filters to get a uniform look across frames and which is highly simplified with respect to the rendering of the forms in the original video. Write down your preferred setting(s).

Import each sample frame modified above into illustrator and experiment with the best live trace settings. Write them down.

If you like what you have, record the settings changes you wrote down above as actions and then batch process the whole frameset; repeat for illustrator.

You should now have a frameset of A > B < A vector images which you can then compile into e.g. flash animations. You can skip the vector step if you need to.

The uniform post-processing and simplified backdrop for the initial video capture makes it easier for you to stay "on brand" when you go to add more content later.

A quick way to see your animation is to put all the frames in a containing folder in the format 000_frame.jpg, set your OS file browser to a preview or thumbnail mode and then rapidly cycle through.

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@Eichhorn212

Rotoscoping comes to my mind first, but it can be extremely time consuming. You can export the clip as frames and use them as guides to draw over them (maybe every 3rd or 4th frame, depending on how smooth you want it to be). It's beautiful in the end, but you'll work for it.
Otherwise, if you can run the clip through filter that will make it 'look' like an animation you'll save a ton of time, but loose most of the control that manual process offers. But, if you start with a really high quality clip, you might get away with it. I've done one of these the hard way and liked it, but it's tedious. Little googling turns up [enter link description here]http://www.silhouettefx.com/store/Silhouette/2 and Adobe Aftereffects, so some options will be determined by your budget.

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