Michael Rodin

In converging rays, a prism will introduce spherical aberration and astigmatism as well.The larger your aperture is, the wider is the cone of rays pointing to the pixel and the steeper is the angle they converge at. Since spherical grows rapidly with aperture (not linearly, but rather a bit faster than (aperture diameter)^3), visually it kind of unexpectedly kicks in after being very mild in the lower range of apertures.

The lamp will last much (couple orders of magnitude) longer if powered on with a dimmer. Quartz lamps, no matter the wattage, practically never die from age - it's inrush current and shock/vibrations that break them. Abruptly turning a larger light off also causes arcing in the switch - hence there are no mechanical switches on the 20K.

DeSisti fresnels and parlights, LTM Cinepars, LTM Prolight fresnels, open faces by Rolf Bloessl made under the brand of Cine-Mobil rental. With Arri you pay premium for 'Arri' letters. There are also riskier variants like "Юпитер МГЛ". In any case, consult with a gaffer before buying.

Speaking about bi-color - does it actually save time? I don't find myself constantly readjusting CT - at most, I'd change gel once after looking in the monitor. Neither do I understand the need for battery power here. LEDs, with few exceptions, don't have the output to be used on EXT, even on a cloudy day or with an overhead silk you need at least a 200W HMI parlight to do something with contrast - and a 200W can be battery powered too. At 100 lm/W it's just as efficient - and much, much more efficient optically. In an interior, you'll have a couple of 16A circuits in newer buildings and 10A in Soviet ones. And when you don't - there are rentals lining up to give you a truckload of battery-powered lights for a dime. Owning more batteries than you need on day-to-day jobs is a waste of money - they quickly lose their resale value, and heavily used ones cost nothing. By the way, you budget is just enough for batteries only if you feel like going that route. As to lamps - I can still get HMI200/GS, which's been discontinued for 20 years or so, and not as widespread as T12 and T7 CFL Kinoflo lamps that are used outside film industry as well. There are things to avoid - sealed beam and 250W HMI etc - but they're all rarity nowadays.

In grip&electric, the grip part plays a larger role in shaping an image than the electric. Do you have a minimally decent grip package available to you? Before investing in lights, I'd get a couple flags, a cutter, a floppy, a diffusion frame, C-stands and a combo with a small boom. Of course, there's never enough grip hardware, but such a set fits into a car and allows you to shoot interiors with some spill/contrast control. The second thing I'd get is a small to medium sized Chimera with a grid. It doesn't actually do anything special and can be replaced with a frame and flags to control spill, but there's less setup time and bulk. Any light source of at least some 10000 lumens (125 W HMI / 500 W tungsten) is OK as long as you can get a speed ring for it. Then, with the rest of budget, I'd look for a couple spotlights, ideally with enough power for a day interior. The most useful workhorse lights are 575 and 1200 HMI fresnels. You can get them used cheaply - but consult with a spark (electrician, lighting tech) before buying and have it inspected before use. LEDs are weak (that light is 100 W and the efficiency is a match to HMI at best), heavy, expensive and short-lived. Tungsten is generally practical only in studio, blacked-out interior and night settings. A kit composed solely of kinoflos is limiting, and they're a tad too pricey for the amount of light. All that said, it might be wiser to buy a very basic (and cheap) electrical kit with par cans, tungsten fresnels, redheads, maybe cheaper fluorescents and rent the punchier daylight fixtures. Camera and G&E equipment rental rates in Moscow are some of the world's lowest.

There's a popular misconception that video (especially if not debayered in camera) somehow stores 'raw info' about the scene and can be color graded to any palette and tonality while a negative image somehow has a color palette 'baked in'. Actually, it's rather the other way around. Film's main properties - sensitivity, contrast, grain structure (grain size statistics & edge effects) - can all be manipulated with exposure, latensification techniques and development. On top of that you still have color correction - printer lights and digital grading. A video camera sensor is stuck with a specific sensor's photodiode signal-to-light curve. You can't even vary the analog gain and pre-knee on most D-cinema cameras. And the digital stream coming out of your camera's ADCs isn't somehow more 'correctable' than a scan. The noise floor is usually lower, but other than that it's technically the same. If two hues can't be distinguished due to the deficiencies of the sensor's color filtering, not only color information, but also detail is lost: say, if two non-metameric reddish skin tones (the 'blood vessel hue') are filtered into the same R:G:B ratio, you could get visibly paler cheeks on a portrait. No way can you 'fix' it in a color room.

But why shouldn't Skypanels be crappy, given they're RGB LEDs?

Must've been the Videtal 8-44.

If there's a lab not too far away I'd do a strip test and expose/filter based on the measured density curves. Expired fast film isn't as predictable as old slow stock. That said, low-contrast negative like Vision 3 can tolerate virtually any amount of overexposure. You can literally shoot 7 stops over and get an image (although scanning negative this dense is problematic to say the least). I'd expose expired 5219 at EI 100 or denser if I had to shoot without testing.

Rays don't converge to an intermediate image anywhere in the lens, and in any system the aperture stop is a place where rays are not focused. So the front and rear parts of, say, a symmetrical Planar/Double-Gauss lens aren't independent in a sense an objective and an eyepiece of a telescope are. Two halves of different lenses will still focus light at some distance. Even in wide retrofocus lenses components before and after the stop are both low-power positive (converging). You can get a very soft image with severe aberrations if you're lucky; more likely the spherical will be so bad you'll hardly see an image. Actually, some lenses do have independently corrected components that can be used separately to an extent. Some tele zooms consist of a quasisymmetrical "main lens" and a variable afocal converter (a variable-magnification galilean telescope in substance). A lot of wide-angles are basically a quasisymmetrical lens with an afocal converter. But the components aren't separated by the stop - it's always inside the "main lens".

It's an Apollo 6000. I'd inspect the springs that hold the globe - they get cracked sometimes. That ballast was made by IREM of Italy. As far a I remember, there were even two-phase (2L+N+PE) balasts in the wild. Is your one- or two-phase?

What happens to light in dielectric medium like glass is interesting and you don't actually have to delve deep into QED to explain the basic phenomena. There's a Ewald-Oseen extinction theorem in wave optics that explains whats' happening. Briefly put, the light wave doesn't slow down coming from air into the glass. It stubbornly continues to propagate at the same speed for a while. Doing so, it forces the medium's atoms' electrons to oscillate at the same frequency (it's more complicated really, but a crude approximation works at our visible wavelengths) and generate "secondary" waves (and then "tertiary" and so forth since one dipole excites the other) propagating backwards - thus we have a reflected wave - and forwards. Waves from each atom add up with phase shifts - because they were emitted from different points in glass. There in the sum we have a wave just like the incident one but with the opposite sign, so the incident wave is canceled out. The rest, when summed, looks like a wave propagating slower by a factor of refractive index. And you can view wave optics as "statistics of many photons": while in quantum we're talking about the probability of finding a single photon somewhere, in wave optics we're dealing with an EM wave formed by myriads of photons carrying an energy proportional to their number. Don't take is as legitimate definition though as it's very, very inaccurate. Many concepts (diffraction et cetera) are similar, but they're applied to different objects in QED and classical ED. Feynman's books are brilliant by the way, all of them. And used to be very popular on the other side of the curtain too.

Old Arri Apollo fresnels have actually got better photometrics than newer Compact and D-series thanks to bigger lenses. Color depends solely on the globe, and these lights use the ubiquitous double-ended HMI. Beware of old Arrisuns - the 575 with a PAR36 and the 1200 with a PAR64 lamp. Both globes are extremely rare and a conversion to MSR is usually not worth it.

No - it's the other way around. Rays from a point in object space fill the entrance pupil. Then rays going out of exit pupil converge (not perfectly because of aberrations) on the image plane (again, not exactly a plane because of astigmatism/field curvature). In measuring - none. Theoretically iris can be placed anywhere - but depending on the opening size it'll be either pretty useless (it'll only contribute to vignetting) or, if closed down enough, become the new aperture stop. Depth of field is proportional to 1 / (entrance pupil size). Depth of focus is proportional to working f/number, which depends on pupil magnification (but pupil magnification is a big deal only at close distances).

Only with external recording through SDI. 900R is basically a 900/3 in a smaller DVW970 casing with a built in serializer for SDI output.