The right hardware goes a long way in making a great video, but a little planning never hurts either. You can do a lot to boost the quality of your movie before you even pick up the camera. Obviously, you can't plan spontaneous videos, but if you are out to make one, then you may find some of these tips helpful.
One thing that makes a video sluggish is something called a low framerate. As you know, videos are made up of lots of pictures “pasted” together. When the pictures are very similar from one frame to another, the computer has to do very little work to refresh the screen and move to the next frame, thus speeding up the framerate.