Music teacher educators are continually reflecting on best practices for nurturing a new generation of effective music educators. An essential aspect of this nurturing is ensuring that pre-service music educators spend meaningful time in school settings. However, what happens when new policies and procedures make early field observation increasingly difficult? This paper presents reflections from two music teacher educators at a large North American university on navigating a 40-hour observation requirement for first- and second-year pre-service teachers (20 hours in music education settings and 20 hours in special education settings). Over the past several years, we have identified challenges within the existing model, in which students independently secure observation placements. Equity concerns arise when students lack reliable transportation or financial resources. Completing observation hours during academic breaks may impose hardships on students who rely on that time for paid employment. Additionally, many school sites now require extensive background checks and documentation, processes that are essential yet difficult for students to navigate independently. In this paper, we synthesize our current reflections and discussions on these obstacles to conducting field observations and propose a “digital third space” in which pre-service teachers may engage more intentionally with video resources to supplement their early observation experiences. Importantly, we do not propose video-based observation as replacement for embodied field experiences. Rather, we conceptualize a digital “third space” as a scaffolded, dialogic environment that complements and prepares students for classroom engagement while mitigating inequities that delay or restrict access to early fieldwork. Since the mid-1970s, researchers have used video to study classroom interaction. Video research expanded significantly in the last 50 years, including studies of literacy and bilingual education, later research on science and mathematics, and international comparative studies of pedagogy that led to the establishment of video libraries (Erickson, 2011). Building on this tradition, we propose maintaining a curated library of teaching episodes featuring professors, local teachers, educators from diverse communities, peer teaching, and classroom footage paired with guided observation prompts to foreground relational dynamics, pedagogical decision-making, classroom discourse, and nonverbal interaction. This thoughtfully curated digital approach would provide accessible opportunities for observation by creating a virtual space where the university and K-12 classrooms meet. As Collier and Collier (1986) noted, video provides content but also the “emotional flavor of human activities” (p. 176). Erickson (2006) emphasized that close study of interaction is central to understanding learning and that video allows researchers and educators to examine interaction conduct a posteriori. In music education, such analysis may illuminate gesture, ensemble communication, posture, and spontaneous decision-making. For students facing logistical or financial barriers, video does not reduce field experience to a one-dimensional alternative. Instead, it offers structured engagement with pedagogical complexity, potentially increasing equity of preparation while maintaining the centrality of in-person teaching practice. By sharing our department’s ongoing reflections, we aim to foster dialogue within the international community on how videos can bridge coursework and fieldwork. We invite debate on how teacher education programs can uphold embodied, relational learning while also responding to contemporary institutional constraints.