YouTube has risen to prominence in recent years as the Internet's choice for getting video from point 'a' to point 'broadcast' - attracting Google's attention and purchasing dollars with its one hundred million video views per day. While there are other options to get your video online, YouTube remains, by far, the most wildly popular. Its massive amount of content attests to its ease-of-use. However, these tips and tricks will help you out with just about any video broadcast site out there - from iFilm to GodTube - since they focus on the basic practices of capturing, editing and converting video into a format the Internet can understand.

If you would rather watch than read, here is a short video tutorial showing you the steps involved. 

Getting started
To get your video up on YouTube, you need four things:

• The footage itself
  
• A computer with a high-speed Internet connection
  
• Basic video editing software
• A YouTube account.
  

Now through December 31st, people signing up for a Motionbox premium membership or those who purchase a Motionbook (a flip book made from 15 seconds of your personal video) are qualified to win this 30-minute Flip Video device – www.theflip.com/products_flip_video.shtml – which allows consumers to shoot and upload their video to computers quickly and easily. The Flip Video is perfect for those capturing, editing and uploading holiday videos on the fly. Not to mention, these devices are pretty cool and valued at $150!

Motionbox (www.motionbox.com), is a web site that makes it easy for consumers to upload, share, mix and send their favorite video with friends and family. Motionbox does for video what Snapfish and Shutterfly do for photos – by offering a secure place to share, store, edit and order hard goods from your personal video files. One Flip Video device will be given away each day to qualifying participants until the 31st.

SANYO has introduced the world's first waterproof camcorder, the Xacti E1. The E1 can record video and 6-megapixel stills under water to a depth of five feet for up to one hour at a time. Easy to use with only one hand, it's perfect to take to the beach or lake or to use in the backyard pool or water park.

Completely tapeless, the device records both video and still images to a standard SD memory card or SDHC card. Users can record 10 hours of full-motion 640 x 480 pixel, 30 frames-per-second video on a single 8-gigabyte SDHC memory card (not included).  read more »

The DZHS500A and DZHS300A hybrid camcorders from Hitachi feature an internal hard drive, perfect for when you want to grab a lot of footage but not carry around DVD discs, or for recording long events where you plan to produce highlight reels from the footage. The internal hard drive (8GB on the DZHS300A, 30GB on DZHS500A) also makes downloading footage to a computer for editing a snap as well as performing basic in-camera editing when no computer is available. The 1-Touch Easy Dubbing feature lets you quickly burn footage stored on the hard disk drive to DVD for playback on most home DVD players. The Hitachi hybrid camcorders also feature a drop-proofing system that automatically detect falls, suspends read/write activity and cushions the hard drive for impact.  read more »