When you record video for a podcast you have three options to acquire your footage. You can shoot with a miniDV camera (i.e. a video camera), you can shoot with a hybrid camera (i.e. the movie mode of most digital still cameras) or you can do a screen capture from your computer.

The final compressed video file will be much higher quality if you can keep the motion to a minimum (as only changes in the image need to be encoded), thus use a tripod and avoid unnecessary movements.

You can import and compress your content using Quicktime Pro. Apple has a nice online tutorial for mac and windows users. For a miniDV camera plug in the camera, open Quicktime and select "New Movie Recording" from the file menu. Click the red "record" button on the preview window and play the video on the camcorder until you have captured your full clip. If you are using a hybrid camera or screen capture software you can just open the video file in Quicktime. Once the video is in Quicktime, select "Export…" from the file menu and set the Export format pop-up menu to "Movie to iPod".

If you are using Handbrake or Videora export it in h.264 format with a resolution of 320x240 or 640x480 to produce an appropriate video file.

Compression will take about 2-4 times longer than the actual video footage, so a one hour video could take 5 hours to compress! If you expect to be encoding a lot of video, consider an mpeg-4 camera that records directly in the format necessary for playback on an iPod.

If your video file needs to be edited before it is published you can use iMovie on the mac for the capture, editing and exporting (it is preinstalled on all macs). Check out Apples on-line tutorial. On a PC you can use windows movie maker, as explained in this tutorial.