You will need a basic understanding of the parts of the camera before you can begin recording. Here is a picture of what the top hand side of the camera looks like with all of the different buttons labeled. Let us start with the eyepiece that is what you are going to look through to actually see what you will be recording. You will press down on the video record button to actually begin recording. If you want to take just a still image you can press the Snapshot button, on top of the camera. Here is the correct way to hold the camera looking through the eyepiece with the eyepiece pressed up against your eye and with your hand on the video record button.
Notice that if you are holding the camera this way the built-in microphone is on the side away from you, so if you are going to be adding narration to your movie, you will want to do that later in the editing software because it won't pick up very well while you are filming. You will need to keep an eye on the display before and during your recording. You will want to check to make sure that your batteries are fresh, because if you run out of battery during filming you will loose all the footage that you have stored on your camera.
You will also want to check the image quality settings. I recommend that you keep the camera on the high quality setting, although you won't be able to store as much on the camera, the normal quality video is really pretty poor and I don't think you will want to use that. The counter tells you how many items, either video clips or still images you have stored on the camera. You can store five items at a time in the camera on high quality. The memory progress bar is another indicator of how full your camera is if it is all the way around the display that means you are out of storage space on the camera.
If you run out of room you can use the delete button to delete items that are stored on the camera, but there is no way to preview items before you delete them. You can store one minute of video on the high quality setting and four minutes of video on the low quality setting. The one thing you will notice is that there is no on or off button on the camera, you just press any button to wake it up and if the camera is inactive for three minutes it will put itself to sleep and that is it for the parts of the camera.
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