I'm shooting a music video inside a restaurant with drop ceiling (location) and would like to create practical overhead lighting (like this) to give us more freedom with our framing.
In the example above -- it looks like they popped out tiles where they needed light, laid out a large cut of diffusion across several tiles and placed individual fluorescent tubes (astera, quasar or kino?) on each rectangle. What do you think? Can anyone provide any helpful ideas on how to achieve lighting like this on a modest budget?
The restaurant also has several 3-bank T12 fluorescent fixtures already installed. I'd like to replace these fixtures with T12 kino tubes but the location is pretty dated and I'm worried about flickering because of old ballasts. How can I tell if the ballast will produce a flicker? I looked around the fixture and didn't find any specs printed on the side.