The first question you didn't ask, and should, is "does fiber optics offer me much or any benefit in my application" - and as someone who was in your shoes, but differently, 4 years ago, I think the answer is probably a resounding no. There's my "push in the right direction" for you.
You are talking about firewire drives (800 Mbps at most - often less in practice) and 24 Mpbs video streams, in a single building (at least I take "a video lab" as presumably a single building.) Gigabit (1000 Mbps) copper (Cat5e or higher - not Cat5) ethernet into a network switch will serve those needs without breaking a sweat, and without spending more money to get no practical benefit.
Fiber optics become interesting and useful when you need to interconnect buildings (my project), when your building is large and 100 meters is not a long enough cable, and for higher-speed in-building links (ie, if you moved from Firewire drives to Fiber Channel drive arrays at 2, 4, 8 or 16 Gbps.) They are also of benefit when there are space constraints on the cabling (a fiber cable with 12-24 fibers can be smaller than one cat5e cable, thus much smaller than a bundle of 6-12 such cables.)
If you are not willing to put in the effort to learn in some detail about the various fiber optic standards and practices, then you have lots of company, and there are plenty of folks willing to take quite a bit of your money and do it for you. They might even be happy to pretend that they are offering you something copper does not - after all, they won't be making money from copper, if you do that yourself. They might even actually be giving you something better, if they build you a 10 Gbps fiber network - but you would have a hard time noticing the difference if your use of it consists of moving 24 Mbps video streams around, or accessing files on 800 Mbps Firewire drives....