in the skin modifier select all the verts you want to flood fill, select the bone you want to weight to from the list of bones, with the weight tool press 1 to fully weight those selected verts to the bone that's selected in the list of bones
Nothing in that vid is so radically different than using the weight tool in Max. Select torso verts, full weight them to the spine, select leg verts, full weight to leg. Select the verts inbetween where you want to blend the influence between them. Press blend.