Cable organization

Hmmm....where to post?

Anyone have a clever way of organizing hundreds of audio/video cables in a facility? We have organized them into boxes by type but it is not ideal. We have wall space but I always hated the big wall of cables.

Any cool products out there?

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
http://www.tiltmedia.com

If someone has a comprehensive solution that they can describe, I'd be grateful as well.

I keep flirting with too many partial solutions.

I have Tubs (heavy guage power) Totes (misc long cables) Boxes (smaller power and speaker cables) Hanging comb racks (shorter patch and signal) Velcro straps (XLR and BNC long cables) Ziplock bags ("device specific" cables), and a shelf unit with small locking tubs (short splitters, gender changers, adapters etc.)

In short, I have at least a dozen divisions of where I store wire and cables depending on the class of the cable and whether it needs to stay with the device or is a general purpose stand-alone connection for specific devices like remote recorder patch cables, phone/ipad/charging cables et al.

It's always more complex than it seems to someone outside this business.

I'm going to keep an eye on this thread, and would be equally appreciative of any useful ideas.

"Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."-Justice O'Connor

We have a "go bag" of stingers and most of the audio stuff lives in another "go bag" so they're both ready for field shoots, which is 98% of what we do, at least in video.

As our systems have grown I began by "decorating" the stand that holds the fireplace implements in my office with cables which weren't in use at the time. (It seemed OK as the fireplace isn't used much either.) When space ran out on that the decorating continued on a nearby guitar floor stand. (Sorry guitar you have to stay in the case.) Also have a few drawers filled with various like items, ie.- drawer of power supplies and their cables, drawer of USB and Firewire cables, adapters, un-used hubs, etc. So, no. I don't have a very good system. Certainly NOTHING as organized and sensible as John's.

The bigger issue is boxes in our storage area overflowing with things like SCSI 1 & 2 cables, cables for monitors long gone, cables for our old network… you get the idea. Junk. Junk that's hard to throw out when thinking, "Jeezz, I spent a fortune on all this stuff once upon a time." But should become easy to take to the re-cycling dump when I admit that SCSI isn't coming back and we'll need that storage space for what we're using now when everything starts getting hooked up with Thuderbolt cabling.