Live Production: The Creative Cook’s Dilemma

Why the joy of creating is so often derailed by the hunt for ingredients and tools

I love to cook.

Not fast cooking — not the “30-minute weeknight dinner” kind. I mean the kind of cooking where I can explore, experiment, and play. I love discovering new ingredients, adjusting flavor profiles mid-stream, and plating something unexpected that feels like a small act of personal expression.

But here’s the thing: I don’t always get to cook that way. Not because I don’t want to — but because I lead a busy life. And when I do find time to create, there’s one consistent frustration that pulls me out of the flow every time:

Where did I put the cumin?
What happened to my favorite spatula?
I swear I had another shallot…

It’s always something. A tool I thought was in the drawer. An ingredient I thought I had. And suddenly, instead of creating, I’m rummaging. Hunting. Backtracking. Trying to reconstruct the kitchen that, in my mind, was already set.

Mise en Place — The Dream State

In the culinary world, there’s a French term for the ideal: mise en place, which means “everything in its place.” It’s the practice of preparing and organizing every ingredient and tool before you start cooking.

In a professional kitchen, mise en place is non-negotiable. Chefs can’t afford to stop and search mid-service. Their knives are sharp, their components measured, their tools laid out like instruments before a concert. Everything is ready to go.

At home, though? Not so much. In my kitchen, mise en place is more of a goal than a reality. And when it fails — when something’s missing, dirty, or misplaced — it breaks the rhythm. It steals time. It drains energy.

And honestly? It steals joy.

From the Kitchen to the Control Room

As frustrating as that is in my kitchen, I’ve seen the exact same dynamic in my professional life — working in live media systems.

Production teams today are bursting with creative potential. We’ve got high-quality cameras, powerful processing tools, cloud infrastructure, AI-assisted metadata, and more. But when it’s time to actually build a live workflow, so much of the effort goes into assembling the setup.

It’s like we’re still unpacking boxes and unrolling cutting boards while the orders are already coming in.

Setting up SRT feeds one by one. Correcting IP address typos. Calling the venue to figure out what happened to my feed. Troubleshooting alignment issues. Troubleshooting application configurations. Finding the virtual version of that missing spatula — again.

The tools are powerful, no doubt. But we spend so much time just trying to get them into place.

Creation Shouldn’t Be a Hunt

Whether it’s a kitchen or a live production environment, the problem is the same: when you lose access to your tools or ingredients — even briefly — you lose momentum. And when you lose momentum, creativity suffers.

It’s not about speed, necessarily. I’m not asking for faster cooking or faster media pipelines. I’m asking for smoother ones. For environments where everything is in place when you need it. Where you can focus entirely on creation — not construction.

That’s what mise en place is supposed to be. That’s what we should be striving for — not just in kitchens, but in media infrastructure, too.

Up Next

In the next post, I’ll explore how this lack of “mise en place” shows up in modern live video workflows — and why new developments in shared memory are beginning to shift the paradigm.

But for now, I’ll leave you with this:

Creativity thrives in environments where tools and ingredients are ready, and the friction is gone.

Wouldn’t it be something if our systems — not just our kitchens — actually helped us stay in the flow?

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About the Author:

Mike Cronk

Mike Cronk is Vice President of Strategy at TVU Networks, where he helps scale the company’s award-winning cloud and IP-based live video services. With over two decades of experience at AWS, Grass Valley, and as founding Chairman of AIMS, he has been a driving force in media workflow innovation and cloud transformation.

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