Using Video Referencing

When we use Live Action Footage for Video Referencing,  or are trying to act it out, we run into two significant difficulties: 1. Not all of us are natural actors and almost none are trained. It naturally leads to very poor performance.   2. Even in the event of great live action footage we may get lost in enormous amounts of details, that I call "life noise".
Luckily there are remedies for both problems: even the worst actors among us are able to create telling poses and we can clean life action footage by selecting and making snapshots of
1. Story point poses
2. Extremes
3. Breakdowns.
Let's illustrate it on the example of Youtube video of simple jump.

1. Whole video reference. I record it from Youtube, using various tools available online, or I'd create my own original video.

2. Having opened it with iMovie scroll through, find Extremes and make snapshots of them

3.Load it into a Movie Maker (or any other editing software), play with timing and record again to create something reminding of blocking in stepped. Only instead of CG character we use life action actor.

Now we don't need the rest of the Life Action and it's tiny details.
All we need is go to Maya and pose the character, using timing of "Snapshots blocking" as the guide.
If it is necessary, we can continue and include snapshots for Breakdowns in the process. I won't take the space with pics, but here is the "Stepped Animatic" with Extremes and Breakdowns. Just for fun, I changed my timing to show that the above version is not the only possibility.