With a few of the dollars I received from my parents, I decided to do minor splurge and replace my older tape-based Sony handycam with one of the newer digital units which record directly to a hard drive in MPEG2 format ... wow .. this unit even records audio in Dolby 5.1 surround sound .. !!

I've seen this particular unit for sale a couple of years ago, and now that the price has dropped on it, I decided to grab one while it was on sale .. I am also a firm believer in NOT picking up the latest version of a product when it hits the streets .. I'd rather other people act as beta-testers ..

In addition, I now have a professional Marantz digital audio recorder which records directly to compact-flash memory cards in .wav and also MP3 format...

Our next project is building a clapper board in order to sync the audio from the recorder with the video from the handycam via adobe premier elements ... This seems to be a great approach to making higher-quality videos for youtube ..