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you can never go wrong with a used tungsten fresnel but if your application would benefit from the small led lights (30w - 60w range) they could be very useful additional investment. Personally I think that for low budget stuff the battery powering is the key which makes LED lighting useful and efficient. The prices go rapidly up if you need more output and it becomes very challenging to power them with reasonably priced batteries so you lose both of the benefits of the leds if needing to replace large tungsten lights with them I think and then they are just clumsy very expensive alternatives to cheap tungsten fresnel or a small rented hmi without having any real benefits other than the possible dmx control and less heat output. the cheaper np-f batteries are very affordable compared to the capacity they have and they are very useful for small lights. I believe the largest lights are about 60w or so which can be powered with these cheaper batteries and if you need more output you would need relatively expensive v-lock batteries which may cost 5 or 6 times more per Wh which may become prohibitively expensive for small indie productions. if powering large led lights you would need special v-lock batteries which can stand the high power draw... and of course you would need more of them because they don't last that long on the large lights.

I like to use 300w and 650w tungsten fresnels as a keylight in lots of situations but that depends on what you do and what type of scene it is, what other lighting or natural light there is, how the light is gelled, etc. I am not familiar with the Godox light, is it possible to control the beam with for example a add-on lens? It is useful to have lots of different lights available in your kit so that you can quickly choose the best fitting ones for the scene and shot on hand. For very small stuff (small corporate videos, interviews, etc) I currently use a small battery powered 40w daylight led panel and two tungsten lights which can be for example a 650w fresnel and a 800w redhead or the 300w and 650w fresnels or the 650w and 1000w fresnels. For low budget indie stuff I tend to have the 40w led panel and the 300, 650, 1000w fresnels and a 1000w vnsp par can plus either two 2k tungsten fresnels or a 1.2k hmi par. You may want to explain what you would specifically want to shoot and how much light you need, is there any natural light which needs to be controlled or matched, etc. and we can recommend something for your use 🙂 the battery powered lights, if powerful enough, can be very useful because you can save rigging time in fast shooting situations. For example my 40w panel (Amaran HR672S with two NPF970 batteries) is lightweight enough to be rigged to a boompole or handheld at the end of a lightstand so that one can save lots of time because overhead rigging is not needed. Not overly powerful or high quality but gets the job done very very quickly compared to any mains powered wired alternative

but you DID see a difference when grading the material? you should be able to get the external recorder to run on record trigger so that you can easily record to internal at the same time not thinking about it much and only use the external files if you see in grading that they are needed. full hd prores should be able to be recorded on normal HDDs which are very cheap and you could probably just use the hdds once and store them just as is until the grade is done, no need to copy the files anywhere because you are mainly using the internal files unless the prores version is needed for the more challenging shots.

Just imagine changing the size of that yellow framing. that would be equal to changing the sensor size of the camera. the full frame sensor would be yellow frame covering the very edges of the monitor, the current state being slightly smaller sensor than full frame, and S35 being smaller box, S16 the yellow box only covering the center of the display. The image circle of the lens never changed but the different sized sensors just use different portion of it

here is a old 22mm oct18 lens on a full frame photo camera (the lens is originally made for academy 35 format for use with Konvas cameras) . You can see the image circle only covering the full frame sensor partially but there is potential for all types of smaller sensor sizes within the image the lens is able to produce.

can you just use it with an external prores recorder if you need more bitrate for grading? you should get a used 1080p/i external recorder for very cheap nowadays including the capture drives and all

The large format lens on small format may have lower contrast and more aberrations and less resolving power than a lens optimized for small format. The field of view is the same like Stuart explained

here it is common to do the blu-rays from prores tv masters. just the required audio channels selected and then encoded from it. So it is basically exactly the same grade version as the TV version. the tv version's grade is fine tuned after the cinema grade is made to ensure that the darkest scenes can be seen in typical living room setting which has lots of ambient light, and that the movie is also in right color space etc. Some very big movies might do separate grades even for every delivery version I have understood but for normal use one typically only needs the cinema version and the tv version and that's it. taking into account the typical post budgets it is pretty uncommon to have any extra grading time or deliveries unless the customer is paying for them separately ;)

you mean magic lantern raw or still sequences or h264? if having relatively small size files then the internal edit proxies would do if you edit with the same computer. the offline edit method works well when you have large amounts of material which takes enormous amount of time to convert and which does not play back natively very well or at all. For example when you need the capacity of another computer to do the offlines in time. I personally use one or two computers as offline versions rendering machines and third computer for doing other stuff at the same time. just rendering the offlines can easily take 5 or 10 hours per computer per material batch when running two computers at the same time (1 or 2 shooting days worth of material) so it is very handy that the main editing computer is not reserved for days by the proxy rendering. Another reason is that it is much easier to transfer the files between my data management lair and the editor. the third being that the offline versions are not editing program specific like internal proxies often tend to be. the fourth reason being that I only need to do the grading and LUT and debayering once and the director preview versions can be made from the edit offline files, NOT from the original raw camera files. that is about 10 to 20 times quicker to render which is very significant

Having a new ssd may enhance your editing some amount so you could give it a try. Using proxies will require more total storage than editing from originals because doing the extra versions but the beauty of doing offline editing is that you dont need to keep the originals around AT ALL when editing and the originals can be stored elsewhere in other hdds if needed. The editor does not even need to see the originals in any part of the process which is quite often the case in the productions I work in. Offlines in, xml and playout out and the picture post handles the originals. One can customise the offline codecs based on the program used and the edit computer specs so that one can always edit flawlessly no matter what type of incompatible 20k high speed raw the source material happened to be. One can just do the offlines to for example normal fullhd and for example 300 times smaller file size than the originals. Lut and color correction already applied. Online takes more time of course but that is small disadvantage compared to having the huge benefits in editing. Btw note that I use different workflow than the other common practice of doing proxies directly in the editing program. I always use separate program, usually resolve, for making offline versions and the file handling is done by me rather than letting the edit software do its own proxies by itself and arrange and rename then as it likes. "True offline editing" compared to just using internal edit proxies and still having the raw materials around in the same computer which can work in smaller productions with easy raw materials

another benefit of doing intermediate offline edit versions is that you can apply burn in timecodes and bars if needed. at the moment I do the edit versions without bars or burn in info but the director previews have burn in timecode+frame count and semi transparent 2.39 bars over the image so that the original compositions can be seen easily but one can also see how much reframing potential there is outside the bars. extremely handy for previews and the files are so small that they can all fit to one portable drive or one can use FrameIO or other service for them if needed

this is what I normally do for documentary material.... all the files have the same timecode and can be used for editing. HD prores can be done as well. The edit and preview versions have the necessary LUT applied and they are also lightly graded which is mandatory for the type of footage I normally handle As you can see there is slight size differences between the versions as well as slightly different performance requirements for playback and editing 😄

how about editing with internal proxies or alternatively making separate offline material versions with burn in LUT and even some grading if you want? I normally do the offline versions with Resolve so that the editor's life is much easier and there is already LUT etc applied. Another reason is that it is mostly RAW footage and would natively play back maybe 5fps in normal edit and some of the material not even compatible with the edit software so would be nonsense to try to use the originals for editing

I like to light from the side with a semi soft source so that the key already makes good eyelight reflections depending on the angle how the actor is facing the camera. the 'eyelight' is a reflection of a source and thus it matters how big it is compared to the distance and eye curvature. I have never been a fan of very sharp small eyelights so I rarely do the dedo or pocket par with a snoot trick. another reason is that it often takes lots of time to adjust it correctly to make it look good and work for the actor movement at the same time so I usually don't bother with it... another big reason is that bright lights pointing directly to the eyes distract actors heavily and they may start to blink more often in addition to the performance being less perfect. there is little point of doing killer beautiful eyelights if they distract the actor so much that the performance is compromised. anyway, you can do makeshift snoot out of cinefoil if you want to experiment with them. I also may use small round shiny kapa boards (about palm sized DIY shiny surfaced reflector) as a eyelight source, they work great is some situations and are easy and fast to use. I don't know how much contrast you want but the semi soft side source without fill can still create quite contrasty look though may need some other fixtures as well for not becoming "too indie looking" . here done with bouncing a 300w tungsten from a 3x3 styrofoam which is about 2 meters away if I remember correctly. no fill or specific eyelight used. similar type stuff would be possible with the "deakins lighting" where one would use large soft side key with SAME SIDE harder but still relatively soft fill which is more frontal. key side filling of the eye sockets with a snooted 'eyelight' source might be the answer you are looking for?

wow the same actress appears in both of the cameras and is even lit almost similarly, truly incredible content matching by Blackmagic! 🤣