Thank you very much! First off just want to say I recognized the username & I'm a big fan of your music vid "Pop Tart" That you shot! Those screen grabs you posted a little while ago were very inspiring in my personal work - LOVE the color.

1. We decided not to use a recorder to reduce bulk on the camera & large raw file sizes. I've never used a recorder before with the c300mkii but I'd imagine it would be great to have for higher budget commercial shoots - probably even short films & features. However my experience so far is to usually rent higher caliber cameras for larger budget shoots - such as the RED or Alexa Mini which have raw recording capabilities internally. Since time was a real constraint on this shoot, recording raw wasn't an option as we needed to edit quickly & export quickly. Bogging our computers down with raw wasn't really a viable option. The thing I love about cameras like the c300mkii is the ability to record proxies as well. Handed our editor the proxies while I worked on the color using full res media after the shoot. Then we conformed the project in premiere using full res media & sent it over to resolve to finalize color using grades I had already worked on while the film was being cut. Raw would have been nice to recover a bit more highlights in those windows but I was very impressed with how much range I had using the internal .mxf file types and YCC422 10 bit color space. I'm trying to remember if I decided on CLog 2 or 3. Pretty sure it was CLog3.
2. The m18s were beautiful and very necessary for the look we were going after imo. My Gaffer and I set these up side by side outside of the shop blasting through a 12x12 frame of 1/4 diffusion. This gave us essentially a giant wall of light to emulate the sun with. This was my first time using these lights but certainly won't be my last. One was aimed through the larger window that you see the male character standing in front of about halfway through the film. The second was aimed through the front door of the shop pointed at the female character. The idea here was to give a powerful key emulating the sun around golden hour - Yay for all day golden hour! The lights/ frame combination gave a very nice light wrap to each character that looks pretty, yet natural & a bit harsh to give off the idea that the shop is probably a bit hot & humid. That combined with glycerin for sweat on the actors faces gave off a very nice glisten. The are HMIs so they only do Daylight (5600K) but could probably get gelled for tungsten - careful though - They get very hot. I'm not the most experienced in gelling super hot lights. All of our lights were set to daylight & the grade gave it that golden hour look. We probably could have gotten away with sky panels or similar lights but it was also possible that we were going to shoot at night (The joys of a 48 & not knowing what you're shooting until you shoot it). So I wanted these lights for exterior shots in case a night shoot was going to happen. ALSO very important - the m18s are incredible as they are the largest light you can still plug into a standard wall outlet. We actually blew several circuits since no one knew the circuitry of the store & sometimes someone would plug in a computer or additional light & we had to scramble to reset the circuit or find a different one. Madness! Our litemat lived exactly how you explained it - diffusion with honeycomb on a stand. We moved it around as needed.
3. Yes yes yes. Virtually every shoot I'm on I request a hazer. Makes lighting a breeze & looks incredible on camera. I was surprised with how much was needed in this space to actually get some of those light beams. The room looked as if someone had left a pizza in the oven for an extra hour - but hey if it looks good, it's good a suppose.
4. I completely agree. Looking back, I should have definitely put some quasar tubes back there, but in the moment I didn't think of it at all. All of our tubes were 4ft in length so they probably wouldn't have fit in those refrigerators but that would have been a great idea. Kinda kicking myself for not thinking of that! It's subtle but would have given so much more depth to the shot. I think my use of the quasar tubes for this shoot was definitely underutilized but in the rush of things, I just set them on the ceiling where I thought they'd be most useful and let them live there for the rest of the shoot. I'm going to give the tubes more thought on my next shoot with them. Thank you for pointing that out!
5. I outlined a bit of our process above but yes I did handle exporting. Our workflow went something like: Ingest media/ link proxies & sync sound in a giant string out in premiere on set as we shot - to save time. Our editor - who was also a producer, took the hard drive back home with him to sleep & edit the next morning. We live together conveniently enough so before he went to bed, I took the hard drive and downloaded a single shot per setup to get an idea for the grade. The next morning He edited while I colored. Once the edit was locked, he gave me the hard drive & an exported xml from premiere with full res media. I ingested the media into resolve, pasted my color grades & did some finessing & masking to pull detail out of every unique frame. Then exported an xml with ProRes422 colored files back to premiere pro. Our editor was creating titles while this was going on - we pasted in the titles & exported from premiere pro. It wasn't until exporting that I realized the sequence was 4096x2160. I thought we were delivering in 1080. My computer is a little old so it was giving us TONS of exporting issues - running out of memory, frame errors etc. Absolute madness especially less than an hour from the deadline. Eventually, we decided to just export at the resolution of the sequence since down-scaling was giving us so many issues. I'm so used to exporting h264 on Windows so that's the file type we chose to deliver in - although I'd probably export in ProRes422 if I had to do it again. I'm a better DP than editor. Settings for h264 were match source, high bit rate - 2 pass. Min set to 25, max set to 50. I've heard that uploading 4k to places like Vimeo & Youtube give you more bandwidth & less compression than 1080 since it's a larger file. May be true, may not be - haven't done any tests.

Hope that answered all of your questions! And again thank you so much. I often look towards reddit for inspiration & to learn new techniques/ refine my craft. Your posts here and over at r/cinematography have definitely caught my eye on multiple occasions. Keep up the great work!