I usually use my 6 White-Lightning monolights, but I'm thinking of getting some 1280 watt daylight fluorescent floods with softboxes, umbrellas etc for shooting video clips, maybe from imagewest.tv.  Are these things any good for stills?  I'm thinking that it would be easy to fine tune them for fine art studio nudes, etc. but I don't want to be shooting at 1/15th at f/2.8 either.  Anybody have any ideas?

i would see if you can find out how many lumes they put out at a particular distance and then just compare that to what you are getting with a strobe...no reason you cant shoot with flourescants if you have the right color temperature...but they generally will be putting out a lot less light than your strobes...video just doesnt need as much light

lumens...not lumes.....i need coffee.....urf

HMI's have been around in still photography since they were introduced. Kino Flo's are popular too and they put out less than HMI's.

There have been color balanced tubes around for a long time.  Rolando Gomez, at some of his workshops, demonstrates the construction of a poor man's Kino Flo using fixtures and tubes.

The problem is getting the right tubes.  The first thing you need to do is to get color balanced lights.  You are suggesting "Daylight" which is fine.  Be sure that the tubes express their light temperature as a Kelvin number.  Some tubes say "Daylight" but they are not precisely calibrated.  What will happen is that there will be a variation between tubes.  That is common with the cheap ones.

The second thing is it is critically  important for you to get "Flicker Free."  You have suggested that you may want to do video.  You are going to need to get the expensive tubes (and they are much more expensive) to get video to work.  Even if you choose to only do stills, the problem is that when the lights flickr, you stand the chance of capturing your image in the down cycle and your subject won't be properly lit.  If you would like to see the problem, try doing a video of your television screen (regular tube based television).  Video tape the screen and then play it back.   You will understand very quickly.  Get the best quality flicker free tubes you can get if you want to shoot video.

Finally, get fixtures wth decent balasts.  You want your light temperature to be as consistent as possible.  Have you ever noticed how florescent lights vary in color as they age?  That can be from two things.  One, the light temperature changes as the tubes begin to wear out.  You will need to replace your tubes before they show signs of wear.  The other reason they change color is because of the ballasts.  The really cheap lights have really cheap ballasts.  The better the fixture the better the quality of the light.

Good shooting.

Alan. If you go to the site he said he was shopping at, you'll see he's speaking of HMI's which, as you know, are built for video. At least that's how I read it.

http://www.imagewest.tv/

To add what Alan is saying, when you buy the bulbs (Even if they're a crapload of compact FL lamps) you want to buy all the bulbs at the same time, and maybe keep a full set of spares. The reason for this is because as he said they age, and as they age they can change color temperature (this is no different for photo floods or Quartz lamps). So the last thing you want to do is change out 1 light so that the color temperature varies from bulb to bulb.

You can correct for color temperature if all the bulbs are the same, but you'll have difficulty doing so if they are mixed.

Hey thanks everybody!!  Very helpful!!

I went Kino-flo tubes after playing around and measuring the so-called high CRI, daylight etc fluorescent tubes.  The green mercury spike is pretty bad, OK for an effect.

I currently use Kino-flo tubes but build my own fixtures or incorporate the tubes in set-designs.  There's a measurable difference in spectrum between these and the more standard tubes. 

As for ballast, you need a fully electronic ballast to make it flicker free.  Kino-flo tubes require an HO type ballast as these tubes run on 800-900mA.

YMMV,

Rudi A.