....Has anyone done a clinic or lesson that involved video analysis? .... I imagine that not everyone would want to have their form dissected in front of a group.
Had video several times.... Review of video was done as a group. Less stressful when I knew the other students better....
At Elk, there was supposed to be video analysis. Spent time filming my group of four individually. But it turned out that the camera was not working. Definitely a waste of time that day.
Video is great -- because it shows us what the body is doing. Most skiers can't really tell what their body parts are doing because there aren't mirrors on the side of the trail, and most people haven't built up the proprioception to monitor everything they are moving. Video can help with that.
But skiers need to feel what the skis are doing on the snow. Learning to feel the ski-snow interaction can be done without the camera. Pairing video of body movements with feeling what's going on at the level of the snow is the best of both worlds.
I once took a two-day PSIA camp that was supposed to have extensive video. The leader was unfamiliar with how the new software on his camera worked, and he did not have a good plan for video review. Not good! Much time was wasted - hours even.
The best use of video I've experienced happened at a one-week ski camp I attended some time ago, but it had its problems too. At the end of each morning session, video of everyone in the group was taken on the last run as they repeated what they had been working on all morning. This process happened again at the end of the afternoon.
Each person's morning video was privately reviewed at a table at lunch where the teacher was stationed. The same happened in the afternoon as people de-booted in the lodge. So in five days, I had ten videos taken of me, and ten video reviews. All that video review put an inordinate amount of focus on body mechanics with very little focus on feeling the ski-snow interaction that resulted. I found this problematic. We were told not to trust our sensations, only trust the video. This made camp participants dependent on the videos. And on returning for camp next year (good business decision but not so good for campers IMO).
Ten videos was also too frequent and too much. Two reviews each day made the video the primary "judge" of each person's progress. It takes time to change what one does on skis, and I didn't see progress between a morning and an afternoon so those videos revealed failure day after day. It was disheartening. At least no on-snow time was wasted.
If I were leading a once-a-week morning seasonal program (which I hope to do some day soon), I'd definitely do video of each person on a single run at the end of the morning. I'd call down one skier at a time for this. Then participants would be invited to meet me at a table in the lodge afterwards if they wanted to review their run privately, just as at that camp I took, since this part of the process worked well. On snow I'd focus on getting students to feel how the skis performed on the snow and coordinate that with whatever the morning's body mechanics focus was. The video review would focus on both body mechanics and the sensations of ski-snow interaction.
I get more out of seeing short clips during a semi-private lesson with my instructor at Alta.
In a private or semi-private lesson, the review should happen on the chair immediately afterwards for maximum coordination of movements and ski-snow sensations, as marzNC points out.