Best Of

Yeah, there's a pretty active secondhand market in the EU. I would hold off on purchasing it until over there, though it will, naturally, be more expensive.

Tripp Lite makes 240 VAC-input ISOBAR surge strips with US-style plugs on them which were super handy when my family was living overseas. We had a few of those with plug adapters on the inputs to plug in multiple US devices on the outputs without needing piles of bulky adapters. As a bonus, ISOBAR is just awesome for power in general and does an excellent job at filtering if the local mains power is especially dirty.

Speaking of dirty power, do NOT plug anything other than lamps or curling irons into passive step-down converters. They use the same circuit as a triac lamp dimmer and will annihilate anything with a step-down power supply (all modern electronics).

The only step-down converter worth using is a passive step-down isolation transformer. These are easy to tell because they're the size of a shoebox and weigh 20-60 lb from the enormous slug of iron wrapped in copper that's inside. As @Snarkasm said though; the best solution is to just have 240 VAC-capable power supplies for your stuff. Like @ryder said, the UPS is the only one that probably won't work. I'm not real clear on what's entailed in a video lighting system but I'll say that my parents found that each different region had their own favorite light bulb standard and that buying replacement light bulbs was an issue while they lived there (living in Serbia with German light fixtures).

I think you're looking for me.

First, you need to find all the electronics you want to use, and analyze their power supplies. Your PC, for example, almost certainly says it will accept a range of voltages from 100-240v or something similar. European power uses 220v, so for anything that says it can accept up to 240v, all you'll need is an adapter, not a converter.

For anything that does not accept 220v - for example, lots of minor electronics like shavers, sometimes old phone chargers, etc., you'll want a converter (or to replace the piece in question). For example, it doesn't make sense to buy a high-priced converter to handle your phone charger when you can guy a replacement wall-to-USB charger for a couple euro in Germany.

Your analysis of the wattage is correct; there are cheap, passive converters that say they can do 40/50/200W, and powerful active converters that can do up to 2000W. For the 6 years I lived in the Netherlands, I never needed an active converter (or a passive, either, to be honest).

An example of the type of labels you're looking for:

Note how it says 100-240V? That's your winner; this thing can accept European power.

I honestly suggest taking a good hard look at anything you have that doesn't accept 220v and doing a very close analysis of how much you really need it, and how much it would cost to find a Euro-compatible equivalent versus getting a power converter. Converters are usually intended to be short-term 'going on holiday' kind of things, not multi-year use, and while that doesn't mean they couldn't manage doing that, it's safer and cleaner long-term to just replace the power source itself.

If you do end up going a converter route, bear in mind that you can plug a converter into the wall and a US power strip into the converter, and all of the plugs will be US voltage. That said, you have to be careful you don't overload the wattage if you plug a lot of things in.

Let me know if there's anything else I can help with.