There is no such thing as a good aperture for general movie making.. each scene depending on focus point, lighting .. mood would need and require different apertures accordingly.. I can't see anyone saying " I would love to shoot my next movie at f2.8!"

Also.. if you are not prepared to use an nd filter then you won't have a movie look anyway, as you will not be able to stick to the 180 shutter rule in bright light, and all your stuff will look like home movies or at best saving private Ryan...

@suresure123

It is more about the aperture continuity. Aperture change, except just how much light passes, influences the depth of focus field, contrast, flaring, unsharp area shape and quality etc. So if you want your shots to perfectly match when you edit them together, you need to control those changes. The fail safe method is to use one lens with one same aperture throughout the scene, and you have perfect matching shots where color, contrast, defocus areas etc belong to the same world whose physical attributes are controlled by the size of iris.

But those changes are also powerful creative tool, so most of film makers chose to use this to their advantage, creating on purpose visual jumps to emphasise dramatic moments and create dynamic impacts. So there is really no one rule, it depends on your creative decisions and choices.

Ideally this also works for docs, it is a bit more complicated since all those continuities in filmmaking have one goal, and that is the 'suspension of disbelief', in docs, you want to show the real world, it is sort of counter-intuitive, but basically the tools are the same, it is just the premise of real and true that changes. So all those jumps and discontinuity characteristic for documentaries can also be also a creative choice to separate stylistically from 'artificial' cinema.