Videos...
If they weren't welcome on Coticule.be, we wouldn't have gone through the trouble of adding video-tags to the software that parses the forum posts. So, bring them on, I say.
But I do think that we must not confuse the concept of
instructional videos with videos that just show someone performing something. It can be fun to watch a guy play his guitar, but there is practically zero to learn from that for a novice player. While an experienced musician may pick up a thing or two from seeing other guys play, a novice really needs instructional video, which is an entirely different format.
When we transfer this analogy to honing video, it becomes even more problematic, because with music, you can still hear the guy's performance, but while watching a honing video, you have little idea about how the razor is going to shave in the end. When I watch the video that was shared earlier on, for instance, I can't help myself thinking that the razor may not have ended up shaving well without additional stropping on pastes or some other technique for further refinement. But I could easily be wrong. If you watch Thelonious Monk play without sound, you could think that he performed really sloppy. But that couldn't be further form the truth. That's why, after watching that video, I chose to refrain from comments, and I'm only revealing them now for the sake of example.
Right now, there is only an instructional video for Unicot. The Dilucot video is just a quick, uncut illustration of the Dilucot procedure when the concept of "halfstrokes" was first introduced. Before that, we were all doing Dilucot with nothing but X-strokes. Many X-strokes...
A real instructional video is in the make. It will show every important detail of an approach that is guaranteed to work if the "student" manages to copy the instructions in the correct order. An illustrative video just shows something (usually only off one angle) that may work for the guy doing it. If I were to imitate Thelonious Monk, I would definitely end up playing a very sloppy performance indeed.
Bottom line: while any illustrative honing video is welcome, what inexperienced Coticule users really need is more and better instructional videos. We tried to form a video team about a year ago, but there was little anima among our members to get knee-deep video production. Attempts are currently made to resurrect these plans. If there are members reading this, with some spare time and an active interest in video production, please shoot one of the associates an e-mail.
Kind regards,
Bart.