Well, I’ve got the video edit station set up at work, finally. For those of you geeking along at home, the setup includes a mini-DV deck and an international format VCR for playback, an SVHS VCR for recording, an analog to digital converter and a mini LCD monitor to check output. All of this is connected with a massive maze of cables, carefully arranged and velcro’d together in a fashion reminiscent of a badminton net that has collided with an airborne spaghetti factory.
The biggest delay in getting everything together and working was tracking down two simple RCA video cables among the boxes of miscellaneous wiring that we’ve got. This was complicated by the fact that our office has inherited a couple dozen boxes of cryptic gear that had been in use by a video guy with whom we have since parted ways.
The stuff in those boxes is of absolutely mind boggling complexity.
We’ve got four six foot lengths of SVHS cable, lashed together with zip-ties. There’s a heavy-duty 68 pin SCSI cable in there. We’ve got five XLR to RCA adapters for microphones. I found a set of adapter cords and a breakout box for a video capture card, but no video capture card. There’s a pair of MIDI cables, for no apparent reason, together with a score of grounded power cords in varying length and colors. There are a dozen or so mismatched cables with USB connectors on one end and tiny specialized plugs on the other for use with video or still cameras that, so far as we can tell, don’t exist.
All of this has been just bundled up together in a sort of nest and shoved into a cardboard box. And after spending close to an hour untangling it, I can safely say there were no RCA video cables.
On the other hand, if you really like cables, check out Property Disposition in a week or two…