How to wind up your cables to keep them tangle-free
Mar 21, 2018
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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Whether you’re a photographer or filmmaker, chances are you’ve got plenty of cables. Not everything is wireless yet. There are long USB tethering cables, microphone cables, power cables and all sorts. Many of them might need replacing fairly regularly if you just shovel them into your bag and don’t take care of them. At best, you’ll waste a lot of time untangling a mess of knotted cables.
The guys over on The Film Look have the perfect solution, and an explanation as to why wrapping your cables properly is important. For a start, it means less wasted time on set untangling them. But it also increases the longevity of those cables so that you don’t have to replace them as often.
Keeping your cables looped properly looks a little complex at first, but once you practice it for a while, it becomes quite simple. There are, of course, ways to not wrap up your cable, too. Unless you like the mess and regularly putting in orders for new ones. So, don’t do these.
Both of these methods are bad because they stretch and stress the cable in multiple directions. This is why they don’t last as long, and why you’ll often end up with kinks. And the more kinks appear, the more quickly new ones will appear as it becomes impossible to wrap the cable correctly.
The twisting method shown in the video shows two moves working together to create tangle-free cable wraps that don’t stress the internals. Essentially, you twist slightly to make the cable naturally loop the way it wants to. Then create a “reverse loop” so the next loop goes the other way and alternate between these for each loop.
Like I said, you’ll want to practice it for a while to get the hang of it. And you’ll probably need to rewatch that bit of the video several times to really understand how the twists happen to make the loops do what they’re supposed to. But, it’ll be worth it in the long run. It’ll save you time and money.
Going with silicone coated cables instead of plastic coated ones will also help to increase longevity, too.
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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3 responses to “How to wind up your cables to keep them tangle-free”
AKA “over-under” method. I often have to wrap hundreds of meters of different kinds of cables. For softer cables like microphone cables or long power cables, over-under is the way to go. Then there are hard cables like ones we use for video SDI signals, and winding them one way only (“over” but not “under”) is more practical.
and the over/under is much easier to actually do quickly, rather than this method which tries to do two steps (under/over) in one ( a loooong over).
Years of bands & AV wrapping. And the only breaks tend to be at the terminators (which get abused in use!)
I just throw them as a tangled mess in a bag and let the assistant untangle them. :) kidding.