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My source has video of the crash site. and why not my source has a video of the crash site?

Why the article a cannot be used?

Also there are other sentences like we had a video made of our wedding.

How is it different from the above question?

How to identify and use nouns that are both countable and countable nouns?

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Video of the crash site = pictures of it which are moving rather than still photos.

A video = a moving picture composed for entertainment or information and intended to be watched from start to finish.

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  • "Film" can be used non-countably in this way, and "Film (or video) footage" may be seen.
    – Michael Woke Harvey
    Apr 16 '20 at 11:20
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This is one of the few areas where English can be a little "loosey goosey" When "a" is used, it can imply that there is only one, or one of several videos. The articles can also be completely omitted, occasionally, as in this example. It boils down to a question of style, really, and in your example, the omission of the article 'a', gives the sentence a harsher, or bolder news-like quality. There were many detective novels written in a manner similar to this, that we refer to as a "hard-boiled detective novel".

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In English, "a" can be replaced by "one".

I have a video = I have one video

I have video (uncountable), means I have video footage. In other words we don't know how many individual video recordings there are.

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    If you want to fill out that idea, you could contrast “I have one video” with “I have some video”
    – djs
    Sep 3 at 3:28

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