No techniques have been established for assessing quality or troubleshooting video materials before evaluating their clinical effectiveness - for example in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). This paper reports three studies leading to the development of such techniques. In the first study 20 adults rated successive video clips for informativeness and style giving separate ratings for visual presentation and spoken commentary. Pooling across raters yielded a profile of the high and low points within the video. The profile for the first video was replicated across two participant groups, each of 20 adults. This profiling technique identified potential trouble-spots within an HRT video and potential repairs were assessed in Study 2 where the rating procedure was changed to a pairwise comparison, enabling revisions to be evaluated against original clips by another 24 adults. The outcome of this comparison was validated in Study 3 using the full profiling procedure and substituting the revised clips for the originals. These studies show that the quick and simple rating techniques developed in Studies 1 and 2 offer ways of checking the micro-quality of a video and identifying potential trouble-spots. This enables weaknesses to be removed before the effectiveness of the video is evaluated in a clinical context.
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