I would agree with you: you are in over your head.

Personally, I wouldn't use continuous lighting.  It needs a lot more power than strobes, produces a lot more heat, and will still require a long exposure, a large aperture and the associated shallow DOF, a very high ISO or likely all three.  Strobes produce a lot more light for a very shot time, so they give you a lot more options for exposure.  Small apertures make it easy to have a lot in focus, and to make focus less critical to begin with.

I typically use two strobes with bounce umbrellas, the key light to my right and the fill (one stop lower) to my left.  How much power I need depends on distance to my subject, but most any studio strobe (an Alien Bees B400, their lowest end light) will let me do a 3/4 or full length shot of a person.  Speedlights are much more limited, both on light output and overheating if used for rapid fire shooting.

Triggering the strobes is pretty simple.  Either use a cable between your camera and the first light or a radio trigger; let a slave sync on the second light see the flash from the first light and trigger it that way.  Radio triggers are a lot easier; there's a rumor that the PC jack on camera and strobe stands for Poor Connection.  And the whole setup is based on setting the power manually on each strobe with a light meter (I set my key light to F/11 at ISO 200 and my fill at F/8) and then putting the camera on manual.  Oh, and a custom white balance is a good idea.  Get a gray card and use it to capture the color of your strobes.  Different lights (and different ages of flashcubes) will produce different colors.

Good luck.

^^ Brilliant idea/advice, bhr.

Well, I agree with disorderly about the use of strobes.

I will consider to use very powerful strobe, so better generators (Broncolor, Profoto or Elinchrome) than mono torch.
The power is not because you will need power of light but because if you use you 2400 J strobes half power (1200 J) they will recharge very faster than 1200 J strobes used at full power, and it is a big advantage for action photos.

I don't know how much surface you will have to illuminate, and how much depth too (consider to place your lamps where the subjects could be in space/depth). I think that 4 lamps is a good solution.
I would avoid the use of softboxes.
But I think that the use of softboxes like octagon (1,50m) can be good using them without the internal diffusor - the light will be less soft but it will be more powerful.
Alternative solution could be umbrellas, or even big beauty dishes.

As you should not to lose all the ambient light you should consider too to use your camera set with rear curtain sync (so you will have eventual effects of movement behind the subject, not before), and a time of exposure allowing to keep great part of the ambient light.

Radio command it the easiest way to sync you strobes, but as sometime you can have problems or interferences it is good to always have a sync cable (with extension) too.

_____
It is very difficult to give you  good advices without to know exactly the situation.
If you have the possibility to make some test/training the day before it would be very better and you will be quieter the day D.

My philosophy is: Use Natural Light Whenever Possible, use artificial light if you have to and have no other choice. That was the first lesson learned 20 years ago and I still stick with!

Why would  you take on a commercial assignment requiring strobes when you have little experience with this kind of set up and equipment?

This is not gonna end well ya think?

Hey, I wish you the best with this. Really. You WILL learn alot but perhaps not what you hoped to learn.

Quote from: ShadySue on October 13, 2013, 15:08

^^ Brilliant idea/advice, bhr.

sure but in fact if you have a good setup you don't need any "professional" to show/help you doing the job, its not that hard to try a few lights and test it yourself

Ok, reading it again, I see that Ron would be taking sort of set-up photos against a background?
At first I thought he'd be photographing the whole event, therefore running around carrying equipment, with different light requirements at different places.
The 'set-up' is much more doable.

Definitely get strobes, not continuous light. Get a wireless remote trigger set as well.

Just two big softboxes sounds like your idea is to just put enough light to the entire scene. This way, it is likely that you will end up with a very "flat" look in your images. It might work but might look a bit unprofessional in the end.

If someone else is offering to rent the equipment, I would rather get too many than too few. I'd rather figure out that I won't need all of them than thinking "oh, I could need one more over there". You will find that many portrait photographers are working with three or four lights. One of them might be a big softbox to have good overall light on the scene, and the add others to set accents and fill to faces, hair, back light. I would go for light formers like barndoors or snoots that help you direct the light where you want it to be, rather than softboxes that spill the light everywhere. Also make sure you have one or two reflectors and - if you don't have an assistant at the set - you might need an extra stand to hold them.

And well, yeah, if you have never worked with studio lighting before, this will be a big challenge but also a big opportunity. As it sounds, it will be a fixed set, so you don't have to spontaneously change the setup. So take your time well ahead of the event to set up and do enough test shots until you are happy with the results.