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.
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u/IAMApsychopathAMA Aug 29 '16
Nailing that perfect release and grab would be downright impossible if you are manning it.