Depends what it's recorded on. If you can put it on a camcorder that has a firewire output, you can use a firewire card which costs $40 or so then shareware programs to edit and make it a modem friendly download. If you don't have a firewire camcorder or vcr you need an analog video capture card - decent ones are expensive, or if low quality is acceptable, I think there's a usb thing you can buy for under $50 which will capture analog video.
Re uploading, free space to upload stuff is plentiful, but most free places (eg geocities/yahoo) have file size limits of 500k or less despite total space limits of 10mb or more, ie useless for video. Of course, you can pay for suitable ftp space too. If you are lucky, you may have access to a work or school ftp and have lots of free space to upload. I wish I was that lucky :).
Flash-fxp is a good program for uploading or downloading from an ftp.