That orange flashing is bad, means the lamp will lose vacuum soon, the orange flashing is the arc inside the lamp is attacking the glass seals. When a fluorescent does that on an instant start ballast, it only has SECONDS left!

My Sylvania F14T12/D ran with an orange glowing end for over 15 min. and it still has his vacuum! But yeah I agree the end is near...

Be aware, then some ballasts often die, when running the lamp with worn out electrodes. I have seen orange flashing for about two seconds, then large BANG and transistors in the ballast were dead and take with them some resistors and a fuse. But this was in Europe, in US, where voltage doubler is often used at ballast input, electrolytic capacitors in the doubler would fail too and these are not as easy to find (they have to be long life, high ripple current and high temperature rated)

I use a magnetic ballast to finish off the F14, and it is LPF, so no cap. However the ballast indeed gets pretty hot.  It is cooled by a fan.

I had some time to play with it yesterday. I had it on for about 4 hours. It started right up and ran fine for about half an hour. The it started flashing and it did that for an hour or so. Now it just glows dim and flashes once in a while. I am using an electronic ballast, I don't have instant start magnetic. The ballast is not hot. I only paid $4 for it, so I am not going to worry about killing it. I like the way it looks. Both ends are much darker now. I took some pics and video of it. I will post them later.

Static

Electronic ballast would not feel hot on it's surface, only some, not as big, components inside would overheat. All electronic are very low loss from their nature, so even when something severely overheat there, it still does not generate enough heat to be noticeable on the surface.