Lighting question for instruction/sales vid.
 

Hi all.. I am pretty new to this so your help is appreciated.

I will be filming for instructional/sales purpose. The location is an office/lab type areal that has indoor fluorescent overhead lit work areas. I will be filming two scenes. One showing a table top, talent, and parts assembly and another scene will have a talent operating an industrial machine which needs to have aprox a 10foot' diameter area illuminated.

My Lighting equipment (thus far) is two CFL umbrella refrector lightstands. Each has 2*300watt 5Kcolor CFLs. I also have a single 300watt 5K in simple metal holder on a stand. Very budget stuff as I am on a tight budget. I will be video tapping using a vixia HDfs100.

Budget stuff I know, but I want to get the most out of what I can..

My questions are-

1)Would this be enough lighting to illuminate a 10' area? My concern is the overhead lights overpowering my portable lights.

2)Most every situation described here is for lighting a PERSON.. What about lighting a machine/inanimate object? Do the same principles of Key,fill and back light apply?

3)If I have to bring in more lights to illuminate areas/shadows is it true that EVERY light has to be the same color temperature of 5K? Meaning I can't just throw in a halogen..

I already did some basic experiments with these lights in another shop and found illuminating a machine can be quite difficult as there are tons more areas and shadows to deal with..

Any thoughts are appreciated..
Thanks..

Myself i would worry less about a "Backlight" if the primary problem was all the light blockages and shadows and such. where have you seen a backlight being applied where they dont already have a perfect picture in the rest of the image. on the other hand, defining lines in the shadows could be accomplished with the backlight. so when you say does standard 3 point lighting apply in every situation, IMO no NEVER :-) if your running short of same color light/stands or whatever certannly light the 2 subjects (machine and person) first.
are you making a movie or news event or a training tape? that is what you gotta ask yourself when you dont have the equiptment at the moment to make a Movie OUT of a training tape :-)

if you put other colored light sources in the color differentials could be so high that it would fully ruin your picture indeed. when it will happen is when some viewer has thier color set higher. so if you want to mix up the sources of light like your saying, then view it on some monitor with the color to High. then you will see the problem before Little Miss Adjusted sees it :-)

me thinks you should be happy that you have such floro sources to match in industrial location, mabey add in more by going to an Industial light , like some crappy worklights from the hardware store :-) the floro work lights dont cost 2,000 each, but then they dont have to. Also a LED "white" light (not warm) could be much more spotty and help you around floros without as vast of color changes.
then of course watch for minimally seen floro flickering that will be going on, you want to SEE any of that stuff , that will effect your picture, and correct before you get home, the CFLs will not nessiarily have displayed the Overhead flickering you will get at the location, so be prepared to cope with Flor shutter and color settings in the camera.

just the fact that your asking about "stock lighting" as being correct in this situation, shows you have a brain, and got outta film school, and now can think for the situation your in. Your all set, just disconnect from what you have been told you should do, and do what you now know you must do.