How many of you out there shoot HD footage? If you don't now, you probably will be with your next camcorder purchase. It's becoming easier and cheaper to shoot, edit and watch HD footage. But preserving the footage is a lot more difficult than burning and archiving SD footage.

Apple supports HD footage in iMovie and iDVD, but doesn't support Blu-ray burning. To do that, you have to purchase a program like Toast, which is far inferior to iDVD in terms of creating menus and playlists. Of course, you could always go out and buy an Apple TV unit and watch your HD video that way. Apple would like that.

Then there's the problem of preserving raw footage. HD takes up nearly 1 GB of hard disk space per minute. That's five times as much as SD footage. If you buy Toast, you can save that footage onto Blu-ray disks, but only 25 minutes per disk. It gets expensive and time consuming. You can also archive your footage on large capacity external hard drives, but that gets expensive too. So what's a producer to do?

To be safe, I'm archiving to disk and drive. And I'm starting to feel nostalgic for a drawer of tapes.

Online video is about the only context in which a virus is a good thing. A viral video spreads, almost organically, until it has infected popular culture. But this type of virus doesn't cause disease or disorder. Instead, viral videos have been known to induce laughter and amusement in those who watch.

No one is quite sure how a viral video begins. Some successful viral videos are carefully crafted and expensively produced, others involve nothing more than a kid and a camcorder. A many, many videos that try to go viral dry up and disappear when viewers stop pressing the "send to a friend" button.

There's no set way to guarantee viral stardom, but these tips will get you started making a viral video. Good luck!