please, I dont even post my photography here, this is the last place I go to impress people. As needlessly argumentative as you are with people routinely on this board, I'll humour you once.
Your intital post did not address video. It specifically addressed 25 vs. 500 iso film and inspired my response which incidentally was not intended as a dig on you. Regardless, your new statement is a strawman to your original point and still, my response is similar.
In the mid 90's NYC was flooded with DV features, little piddly $100K things that were all the rave once swiss effects did the transfer on "the celebration" and everyone thought that video was the new wave, like it was some kind of new thing and hadn't existed since the late 70's in widespread commercial form. I worked on TONS of those little movies and the lighting budgets on those things were no different than jobs of similar ambition shot on 16mm. If you are shooting live action, you have to cover often large areas and you need lots of heads to do this. The *size* of those heads is grossly different, but you still need just as big of a truck to make it happen.
What digital video brought, in terms of your lighting rental, was a shift from lighting with tungsten to lighting with flourescents. You still had primarily the same amount of heads on a job. What kino flows DID allow you to cut was a significant portion of your grip budget if you found a gaffer that would let that happen. Since the light source is softer you can get away with less modifiers. You still need the lights though.
If you are talking about blair witch and the rest of the garbage that followed it that nobody will ever see, these movies werent lit in the first place and really dont factor into this discussion.
As a general rule, ISO, be it film or tape does not have nearly the impact that one would think it would have on a motion picture of any budget. If you are lucky enough to have a first camera assistant who is good enough to pull it off and you elect to shoot your whole movie wide open at 500 iso ("changing lanes" comes to mind) you *still* need to light the hell out of a set. I dont know how many of you guys here have experience using hot lights in a scenario where actors need to move around but by the time you put a 1K out of the cameras view and diffuse that light to taste, you'd be pretty shocked at the stop you get at the actors mark and unless your whole movie is all about people standing in pools of light, which would be righteous, you need a lot of heads to light a set if you want it lit somewhat evenly, which %98 of what you watch is.
