Digital Kitchen: Creativity in the Blood
Digital Kitchen has its own studio equipped with several HD video cameras, including the Sony EX1 and video-equipped Canon 5D Mark II DSLR. Several crews shot the footage for the viral videos in Seattle and Chicago. To get amateur-looking footage out of top-notch equipment, the Digital Kitchen crew employed unsteady camera handling and poor lighting.
Each project at Digital Kitchen has three or four team members, including editors and effects artists. It's a ping-pong production style that requires complete system compatibility and easy media management. To manage all this unbridled collaboration, Digital Kitchen uses Final Cut Studio with a network of Xserve servers and Xserve RAID storage solutions.
The resulting workflow couldn’t be smoother, Bashore says: "I began cutting the ‘vampire gymnast’ news video with Final Cut Pro on my own MacBook Pro, then passed it to one of our editors halfway through the process. It took her just minutes to translate the project and get the media. Only Final Cut Pro can do that."
Final Finishing
Whether they're creating dead-on reproductions of home videos or assembling eerie intros, Digital Kitchen needs cutting-edge color correction and finishing tools to get the right look. In the past, they turned to color correction houses with complex equipment. Now they use Color, the professional color grading application included in Final Cut Studio 2.
"We're building Digital Kitchen's first-ever color correction suite using Color," Bashore says. "The old commercial model of color correction is expensive, and few clients are willing to pay for it. So we decided to add color correction to our arsenal of start-to-finish, one-stop production at Digital Kitchen."
With Color, the agency is able to provide greater value to clients. "Typically color correction would be a long, expensive, out-of-house process,” says Bashore. “Now we're able to do it here with one guy on a Mac."
But lowering costs is just one advantage of using Color. "It's about creative freedom," Bashore says. "We used to have to wait until the end of a project before we could color correct, and then we'd only get a few hours in the suite. Now we can color correct anytime we want and try on different looks and feels for a piece while it's in production. It lets us accomplish much more."
To get more stylized looks in their video materials, the crew uses Final Cut Studio effects filters. "We're trying to move beyond strictly adjusting lighting or color aspects of the frame,” says Bashore. “We don’t just color footage — we treat it, and we like to make that treatment unique for each project. With Final Cut, we've manipulated footage that's come in off the cameras in ways that I know the expensive color correction suites simply can't do."
Creative Flexibility
At Digital Kitchen, roles are flexible. Producers edit, editors produce, and creative directors shoot video. "You'd be hard-pressed to tell the producers from the creative directors,” Bashore notes. “It's a real workshop environment, and we blur the lines when it comes to job titles. Creativity comes first."
That kind of open innovation and collaboration takes reliable, easy-to-use, and completely compatible tools. "We need hardware and software that allows us to be flexible," says Bashore. "I can do 50 things at once on my Mac, and the Pro Apps are so intuitive to use that I can jump from one to the next. That means that I'm not stuck in one creative area — I can branch out. My Mac provides the tools, and the rest is up to me."
