In my eternal quest to help my livestream team become a little more organized each semester, I came up with a way to help them with some of their cable packs.
The team has lots of cables from power cables and XLR cables to SDI cables and other random cords that connect one thing to another. The issue was, we weren’t real organized with the system. The livestream carts had way more cables than they needed and some were not being used in the best way. For example, kids were using a 100 foot power cord that was meant for the football field, in the gymnasium for a 15-foot run.
Over winter break I went in and helped them by organizing things a little and did the following:
- I used different colors of electrical tape and color coded the cameras. Each camera was a different color like purple or blue or green, etc.
- I then set up the livestream gear and matched up cables of appropriate lengths. Once things were set, I took the same color of tape I used on the camera and color coded the cables used with that camera with the same color.
- Finally, I color coded the hangers on the livestream carts to make it easy for students to find the cables they need and, more importantly, return the cables to the right place at the end of the livestream.
While I will have to report back after this semester on how the new system works, I’ve been around long enough to know this is 10 million times better than the old system we have and I’ve got some high hopes my time was not wasted.
If you’ve got a good organizational system for any of your gear and would like to share it here on the site, I’d love to hear about it. Please email me at aaronmanfull[at]gmail.com.
