How do you get the most quality out of the videos (lights, speed, etc.)

hump de bump

come on, yo!

hit up the movie makers cult

The snow and the sky are the two hardest things for a camcorder/camera to capture. The differences of whites contrasting the darker areas are very hard(especially for older cameras) to capture.

Just like cameras that take longer shutter speeds, it is always a good idea to have a tripod to keep the camcorder stable. Alot of people don't realize how distorted and crappy the image will look if you pan to fast with something, like a skier. So the less you move the camcorder, the better. Notice the best videos hardly ever contain any handheld camera movement, and the best high def videos you see with slow motion panning are obviously not done without a tripod or some sort of extra support.

One last word of advice, if you HAVE to use movie maker, make sure the import is set to the highest possible quality, and that you save it as the highest possible quality(just look at the image sizes). Movie maker is not amazing, but you can tweak it so that it won't compress your video horribly.

thank you
I'm not using movie maker, I'm using vegas, and it kicks ass. Thanks for the advice, I'll dig out the tripod from my closet.

well the camera that I unexpectedly got for christmas is a HDD camera...decent quality, but not as good as the GL2 by far.
any more tips on bringing out highest quality?

Try to get angles where there is one main background. If there are trees or varying colors behind the skier when he is moving it will make him stand out alot less. I always like to get shots where the snow is the background of the skier, if that makes sense.