https://ymove.app/exercise-api

Hi HN, I'm Tosh, founder of ymove.app. For five years we have built white label apps for fitness coaches. Every app needed exercise demos, and the options were animated GIFs (ExerciseDB style), stock footage that never matches, or filming it yourself.

I ended up filming it myself: a white studio, lots of fitness equipment, trainers and physiotherapists, the same framing and light for every clip. Since the start of this year that library is an API, and it now holds 2,000+ videos. First shots were terrible, got better, then got worse again, now better again.

As a developer it has been fun to learn about lighting and camera setups.I'm still learning, but it gets better with every shoot. It is also nice to work with people in a studio instead of only sitting behind a screen.

The repo has 25 videos that are free for commercial use, in case you want to use a few: https://github.com/ymove-app/exercise-api

Things that were harder than expected: - Consistency. Different shoot days drift in white balance, so every clip gets normalised against the same white before it ships.

- Scraping. There is less abuse than I feared, but it does happen, been annoying to deal with lots of different ways signups try to circumvent the system

- Finding trainers. We now work with five to seven people, but cold email does not work. Calling and meeting in person is what gets a yes. Yoga teachers are the hardest to convince.

- Not all 2k are yet on white bg. Moving big machines to a location can be a pain :)

The API is paid ($19/mo and up, 7-day trial). Docs and the OpenAPI spec are public.

Happy to answer anything about the filming setup, the video pipeline or the API.