Flourescent 3 Light Kit Recommendations?

[Glynn Morgan]

Starting a video production business with some film school graduates in our small town. I've been looking at different lighting solutions.

I see the most uses for lighting with our projects being mostly indoor interviews during the daytime. So the two key things I am looking for is nicely diffused light, and daytime balanced light so we don't have to black out windows or mess around too much with gels.

As a result of my research, I have come to the conclusion that daytime balanced fluorescent lighting may be the optimum solution from both a situational standpoint (making use of windows indoors etc.) and from a safety standpoint (lights aren't as hot, faster to move etc.).

Apparently there are many traditionalists that prefer tungsten, we used bog standard red heads at school, which I found to be more trouble then they are worth.

Of course, as we are starting out, we are trying to budget the equipment we need. So we aren't looking at anything too pricey <$1000 would be my first judgement, but we all know how prices can stack. So the cheaper the better.

I'm thinking the most versatile solution would be a 3 light soft box fluorescent kit, balanced to daylight (5600k) - although I haven't been able to determine whether CTO gels would work with these types of kits. I imagine being able to use gels would fix any rare cases where we need 3200k light.

Apologies for the bad spelling.

tl:dr - what would you suggest as a budget, 3 point flourescent lighting set up?

Kind thankyou for you any suggestions and apologies if this has been asked 100000 x before.

[Doug Jensen]

Glynn, if you're trying to stay under a $1000 budget and still do decent lighting, then I recommend you forget about fluorescent and go with tungsten where you'll get more bang for your buck.

Personally, I don't think you can do decent lighting with a light kit under $1000, but the odds are better for tungsten than fluorescent. Keep in mind that there's a big difference between just making a scene brighter and actually doing proper lighting that looks good.

A few years ago I produced an interview lighting training DVD (How to Setup, Light, & Shoot Great Looking Interviews) and $1500 was the least expensive kit I could put together that still have every component I'd need to do great lighting. In fact, it was basically the same kit I was using for about 10 years for CBS, NBC, Nat Geo, etc. For $1500 it had everything I needed for interviews, and there's just no way I could put together a professional fluorescent kit for anything close to that figure. And $1000 is impossible unless you just want to light up the room with no attention to detail.