What are you planning on using the night vision for? My opinion is that it's pretty useless if you plan on using it for a movie, unless of course your movie calls for the night vision look in a shot. The image is usually void of color except for a green hue to everything. Eyes glow, which is kind of weird, but not good unless you want that look. The image quality is also very poor with infrared. If you need to film in the dark, lighting the scene, although requiring much more effort, will make the images look much better.

Actually I got two things I wanna do.. the first thing is that I'm gonna have a night vision scene in the movie, so the quality is supposed to be a little weird.. I probably will modify it post too...

The second thing I wanna do is normal night scenes outside, like in a forest.. But I'm not sure how to power up lights.. any recommendations? The only power source available is my car, and i got a 12V->230V adapter.. but I'm not sure how powerful it is.. maybe I need to keep the car running to use it..
Right now the only light I got is a 150W Work Light.. maybe that could be useful.. but I don't want any ugly shadows.. 🙂

Do people use some kind of generator or something when shooting outside, like in a forest..?

Another thing I want the night vision function for is when filming parties etc, normally there's never that much lighting there.. but that hasn't got anything to do with filmmaking 🙂

For shooting in a forest or a remote location outside is a generator. The only negative thing about normal gas generators is that they make a lot of noise which you don't want on film. For a small production then, battery powered generators that you have to charge are a better option since they are quieter. You can just plug in an extension cord to the generator and plug the light into that, so if you can get a gas one, you might be able to get far enough away. I'd recommend asking around to see if anyone you know owns one who would let you borrow it since they're expensive. Some places will rent them too for fairly cheap.
For lighting you can pick up some cheap halogen lights from Home Depot and be creative mounting them. Actually, I remember our first movie a few years ago that required outside night shots, we used car headlights and flashlights. You'd be amazed what you can do with this. We'd park the 2 cars differently for each shot, like you'd do with a typical 3 point lighting set-up, a key light and a filler light, and then we'd use the flashlights to fill in any gaps or create shadows where needed. We underexposed the footage a bit to compensate for the bright headlights, and then we messed with it a lot while editing like darkening it and such. Since it was in black and white, the lighting was actually acceptable.

My main point is to be creative with what you can afford, as long as the lighting is believable and not a huge spotlight on someone in the dark (unless for some reason you want a huge spotlight on someone)!

Hey, I really like this forum! I wish more people would know about it and be here to discuss this kind of stuff! Do you know of any other good forums like this?

The lighting with cars and flashlights wasn't dumb at all! I guess we'd need a pretty wide flashlight to cover up, but the car lights should be nice..

We're not actually making a serious movie, so it's ok if the lighting isn't perfect..

But what do you think about shooting a movie on day, dawn.. and then altering the colors in post production.. making it more blue, and darker.. would that look fake??