I agree completely. In session reviews by beginners there tends to be a focus on big pots whether they are won or lost, but those are sometimes the hands that plays most automatically. There are a lot of things to talk about in small pots and also with regards to whether to cbet, how much to cbet etc.

I completely agree that it would be best to pre-select a number of hands and have the session revolve around those. It's important here to be ready to present the hands during the session. By this I mean it's important to be mindful which reads and/or stats for the villain you want to be discussing. When you play at a table you have the HUD but when you review the session after you don't have the HUD on the replayer (I don't think). It's equally important that the sweatee/host/beneficiary shares his own thoughts first for each decision point as he goes through the hand.

I think perhaps the best way to do it is a mentoring approach (which it sounds like XTR is half-way employing) where the sweatee submits a couple of sessions to a mentor who quickly looks through the hands and picks out the interesting ones and leaves it up to the sweatee to prepare for the session. It's almost as if I'm proposing a double sweat session. First one that is one on one with a mentor type who decides what goes into the group session - and then the group session has about the same scope and depth as an instructional video, except in a workshop format where the sweatee is under the spotlight.

I do think that in terms of recording/replaying and structuring content I'm generally disappointed by many live play videos that I've seen here and there. Anyone who's done any video editing knows exactly how trivial it is to take some raw material and make it much more valuable by giving it some structure. The density of the content becomes much higher. I know a lot of the training sites have taken some strides and done completely theory based classroom/presentation videos, but to me he obvious best thing to do is a live play session with all the boring bits cut out and focusing on the interesting spots and covering them in a bit more detail than live play would allow.