gee i did not think this was a touchy subject ok heres my two cents worth firstly videos dont give you a real hands on sifu but
what they d give is a lok at one person art and interpretaion the
first video i got was leurng tigs then wong shin leurngs and my sifu gave me his entire collection the thing videos can not do is teach chi sau and dummy as you get not get the correct feel of things but if i see a guy iwant to train with ill look at his video first or ill go to a semminar as that will give an introdution to his art oh a friend of mine gave me wong shun lerung doing chi sau with students in hong kong and i prize this video russell sherry sifu
My opinion is that you cannot leran off of videos so all those instructional videos are…not worth it. If anything, they will make you do things wrong and probalby even injure you.
Many sifus are there to teach in class and the students have a hard time doing it when the sifus teaching there, why would a video be helpful.
other uses of video
i’ve had some good insights from tapeing myself doing forms, sparring, footwork drills and even a little chi sau. Doing the forms in the mirror is good but i fear i focus on the mirror more than the form. Tapeing it allows me another option.
Useing my sifus tapes lets me refresh my memory of gross movements in the forms (for a while i turned my stance in the oposite direction till I rechecked the tapes. This frees up Sifu’s time to fix the little things.
However while i have Sifu’s tapes on “bui jee” avaliable, i don’t watch it, nor would I try to learn the dummy from the tapes. useing other people material is good to refresh, but makeing your own video “notes” can be very helpful, at least for us beginers.