Footage of a seminar I shot on the guillotine and MMA guard passing

**Boyd** · Posted On: 12/19/2007 7:25pm

Attention white belts of the world: put down your copy of Mastering the Rubber Guard for about an hour and watch this video. I realize it may be hard to pull yourself away from all the bright colors and exotic nomenclature, but trust my judgment on this. What follows is a seminar I shot for my first BJJ instructor, Bryan Harper, recently promoted to black belt. He is very very good. In particular, he is very very good at passing the guard and choking people, which is great because I've included ten choking and passing techniques that I think will be extremely beneficial to your collective games. Best of all, they're all tailor-made to be applicable to that most elusive of creatures: MMA-specific grappling techniques.

So check it out. This was my first time shooting a seminar, and yes, I'm well aware that the camera gets a little...dynamic at times. I was constantly fighting for a good angle without getting in front of the seminar attendees or losing audio, so sometimes I had to adjust at inopportune moments.

Attention colored belts and no-gi wrestlers: Same thing, but with a tone less smarmy and condescending, and more enthusiastic.

http://www.youtube.com/LAVATORR

Sorry for not embedding any of these, but I don't want to slow the page down to a crawl.

Also, question for anyone knowledgable in the field of video encoding: this was only my second time uploading to Youtube. I shot all of this on very, very expensive miniDV and exported it from Final Cut as MPEG4 files. On my computer it looks pristine. On Youtube it looks and sounds like everyone's being attacked by a swarm of killer bees disguised as MPEG artifacts. Is there any way around this, or is this just Youtube's stupid fault?

**namaste** · Posted On: 12/19/2007 7:44pm

I is love you and the funny things you say. thanks for the videos.

**UpaLumpa** · Posted On: 12/19/2007 8:22pm

Arm-in-guillotine sweep. I do that preferentially a lot but from butterfly.

**ViciousFlamingo** · Posted On: 12/19/2007 8:44pm

Awesome! I've been actively trying to work on guillotines beyond the garden-variety arm-out closed-guard guillotine, glad to see more footage around to look at.

As for Youtube video quality, would you be adverse to uploading your videos to Stage6 or making it available for download at Megaupload?

If you're deadset on using Youtube, resize the video to 320×240 (native format), deinterlace your video (for interwebs flash maximization), and use H.264 or any other high quality codec for compression. There's a pretty good breakdown of a few other things here.

**Jack Rusher** · Posted On: 12/21/2007 11:10am

Dear Boyd, I've decided to quit my academy and advance my game entirely via an auto-didactic exploration of Eddie Bravo's instructional materials. Tremble before my mighty chili dog!

P.S. Thanks for the vids.