Making good quality Internet videos on a budget

It is possible to do this with a couple of modern digicams (the point and shoot primarily still cameras), but there are a few drawbacks to this method as well. The primary drawback being that most modern digicams are designed to record short video-clips, not long shots. Recording quality video takes up a lot of space, and digicams use cheap SD cards that can't write that quickly. This problem is "solved" either by limiting the length of the video clip, or by reducing the quality (resolution) of the video. Both of which limit your options in editing the video. If you use digicams, you'll need to organize your shooting around short takes, and do a lot more maintenance. Using a high quality webcam is a better option, because it records directly to a computer hard-drive, so you can record (for example) uncompressed video in real time without length limitations. The problem with this is that for two angles, you'll pretty much need two computers. If you don't have two computers, this will be much more expensive than the digi-cam option. Consider getting a hand-held video camera instead (or two). Most of these can plug directly into a computer, shoot much better quality video than the above options, and the low-end ones are not much more expensive than a still-cam or web cam. If you have to buy equipment anyway. a cheap handheld video digicam from like target or something is an inexpensive option that gives you much higher quality. In any case, if you plan on doing a lot of these videos, storage will be a problem. Plan on plunking down a couple hundred dollars on hard drives. You'll need to store the uncompressed video while editing, and it's good to keep it around so that you can make changes later or use it for stock footage in future episodes. You should also ask about video editing software on a budget. I'm not the person to answer that, though.

post-preview, I agree that the audio is the hardest part.

(Partially deaf cooking fan here): For the audio: no background music and provide captioning on all videos. You'll instantly stand heads and shoulders above 99% of the other 2631774 guys doing this!

I do cooking videos for a website, and I use my regular camera (a DSLR that shoots HD video) to do the video shooting. The video quality is great, but the audio is the weak link. My camera (Canon Rebel T1i) doesn't have a mic input option so I use the camera mic for intros/outros. The rest of the video, I use a stand mic and record voice-over during the editing process. It's not a perfect process, but it's not bad and doing voiceover is actually easier in some ways than recording the audio while you're cooking. For lights, I use Lowel Ego lights on tripods and really, really like them. They give great daylight-type light and are small enough to store pretty easily. For video editing, I use PowerDirector by Cyberlink. It's a pretty cheap option ($100ish) and I found it had a pretty smooth learning curve, unlike Adobe Premiere which is a) bulky and unwieldy as all get-out b) not intuitive at all and c) kept crashing my computer. G'luck!