There has been a lot of talk in the industry lately about fixed point belay techniques. Many guides are beginning to employ these techniques on ice climbs and on sketchy alpine climbs.
Essentially a fixed point belay is a lead belay directly off the anchor, as opposed to the more standard belay technique of operating a device off one's harness. The idea is that a lead fall simply doesn't impact the belayer the same way that a lead fall impacts him or her in a normal setting.
At a guide training in 2008, a number of our guides experimented with this technique, finding mixed results. We found that both a tube style device and a munter-hitch worked well, but not so much for a GriGri. Assisted locking devices seem to transfer a lot more foce into the falling person and without movement in the anchor, this resulted in a painful fall for our leader.
The Association of Canadian Mountain Guides (ACMG) has recently put out a video on this particular technique. It is a very comprehensive video on the subject. And it also is set-up in such a way that I can't embed it. So I've linked it below
-- Jason D. Martin