Abstract: To overcome the shortcomings of costly equipment and human body motion limited by motion capture equipment inherent in traditional motion capture based animation, a new idea of producing computer animation is presented in this paper Firstly, motion of human body is captured from video Then the edited motion is retargeted from human to animation characters and cartoons are produced, that meet the requirement presented by animator The key technologies in video based animation, such as motion capture, motion editing and motion retargeting, are studied Based on the study, a video based human animation （VBHA） system based on two cameras is implemented Experimental results show the possibility of capturing precise motion from abundant and cheap video and producing vivid animation through retargeting motion from human to other characters