So, this thread really got distracted by all the kerberos and bandwidth throttling geek wankeritude which is entirely my fault, and something may have gotten lost here...
The point is that we took a c-5050 camera out with an U/W housing and a 1GB CF card (about $1000 of investment, and I'm sure someone could figure out a way to do it with an even cheaper camera setup -- and as it is i had almost an hour worth of storage and we didn't ever have more than about 5 mins of footage in the camera at a time) and managed to get some really useful feedback and made some progress. On the plus side I was pretty happy with how trimmed and generally squared away in terms of equipment and not flailing around that I was -- particularly compared to the video feedback when I took the DIRF course. On the more constructive criticism side, the deficiencies in my helicopter kick (the 2nd and 3rd quicktime movies i put up) are kind of readily apparently. I knew something felt wrong about it when I'd been doing it, but the video feedback makes it apparent that it isn't right just like spectre noticed. When it comes to back-kicks, the video feedback really helped me figure out that I was pointing my fins up and extending them and winding up doing a headstand, which helped me level it out. Focusing on levelling out my fins, extending them together and then flairing them and pulling back it made it actually work, even if its not pretty yet. My buddy was also working on his backwards kick and we got some good footage of how he wasn't flairing his fins right and just wasn't getting a lot of traction, and I think he spotted a few other issues he was having with it.
One thing that was kind of useful is that we'd go down to 10 fsw and do some stuff and take some video and then surface and then just play it back at the surface and go back down, which gave some really immediate feedback. We didn't necessarily have to wait to get out of the water and get the equipment off before reviewing the video. That can really help the feedback loop. I know that I went down at one point and did a bunch of back-kicking and we came up and I reviewed it and it was all bad with me doing headstands, and then we just dropped down and I started fixing that part and it started working... I think the immediacy of feedback can help sometimes. Just surfacing and showing someone that *this* is what you're doing, stop doing *that*, and then going back down can really help make some skills gains... Even with a DIRF class you only review the video after the day is over and you don't get to try to make changes until the next day or the next time you go diving...
So, in summary, I think I'm a big fan of just going out and doing a skills dive with a basic U/W camera in video mode. We didn't even do it in optimal conditions. The sun was out and we kept it shallow, but the viz still wasn't too great. And neither of us really knew what we were doing with the camera. It worked really good though.
So, that is why I posted this thread in the DIR section. You don't have to wait for the next GUE course you take to get more video feedback...