New video: "Is the Voynich Manuscript fake?"

[Barbrey]

Barbrey: an lot was cut from the video. I was constantly trying to keep it under half an hour, which eventually still failed. This is not only in order to keep it manageable for the audience, but also for me. Editing just one minute of video already takes an awful amount of time, so every minute of script adds to the pile.

I think I did present good arguments in favor of HLH's expertise, but not against the others as you point out. An obvious omission was Panofsky. But this would have me explaining that at first he was spot on, but then he changed his mind to something else. Okay, so why did he change his mind, was there better evidence? Then I would have to explain the informal and incomplete nature of Panofsky's statements. And I'd have to speculate about why he so readily accepted the catastrophic "identification" of one of the plants as a sunflower. Then I would go on to explain that you simply shouldn't ask a botanist about your enigmatic medieval drawings. And so on.

This would have added at least 15 minutes to the video, if I had wanted to do the subject justice at all. At that point I thought that I'd better focus on the guy who was renowned for his expertise in assessing and describing rare books and manuscripts. Panofsky should have been included as well, but I couldn't do so without causing a long cascade.

I don’t think you’d have to throw the baby out with the bath water by going to extremes. Mentioning Panofsky is unnecessary. Just a sentence of qualification: “Experts before the C 14 dating was done ranged in opinion from [date to date]; however, one exceptionally well-qualified scholar …” and then the rest you already have. I’m suggesting from an editing point-of-view: when statements trip up smooth narrative because they cause the watcher to pause (as I did), they undermine the video’s veracity and power. And you don’t want that, because your video is excellent in every other way.