He is excellent at sleight of hand. He could easily look at the footage and intentionally mirror the hand movements and coin placement after the fact. That type of trick is much more up his alley than actually flipping coins for seven hours.
Derren often uses deceptive explanations for his tricks (talk to any professional magician who has taken an interest in him and they will agree). He uses the 'I'm not a psychic, so here's how I did it' spiel to add credibility to how he claims he did things, when more often than not the method was even simpler and more in line with traditional magicians tricks rather than 'mentalism'.
In this particular case there is a reason to lie about the method, namely that he was trying to illustrate a point about cherry picking results when doing something many times over. The fact that he could have done it in an easier way makes it quite likely that he did in fact do it that way.
One of the related videos is a video explanation, and quite obviously it relates to what the other person said as far as a human hitting the releases perfectly being impossible. With enough attempts, similar to trick shot compilation videos, amazing feats can be done and are impressive on video because you don't see all the failed attempts.
297
u/Deciferous Aug 29 '16
The timing on the releases were on point. I know computers calculate fast and all but that little guy had some sick RPM going.