I wouldn't say "that terminology has been hijacked by desk manufacturers." Since the inception of Dimmer Per Circuit, consoles have had the ability to control more dimmers than channels. Often, on a 400-channel console with 512-dimmers, a 1-to-1 patch results in dimmer 401 into channel (001), along with dimmer 1, D402+D2 into (002), etc. For an average show, 17% of dimmers go unused, why have random 17% of "holes" in one's Channel Hook-Up?
Even with the same number of dimmers and channels, a softpatch allows one to put channels in a logical order that suits the show and LD, rather than how the electrical engineer happened to number the circuits--which often makes no logical sense....Second of all, assuming you mean the first, every designer is going to do one dimmer per channel--because that gives you greatest amount of control--unless there are some extenuating circumstances: you are only using more than one dimmer because of a power issue AND the instruments would NEVER be used separately, ie cyc lights; or you have more dimmers than you have channels, [see above] but if this were the case I would never design there again until they buy a new desk (unless you were using a LOT of DMX controlled devices--that were rented so it was not the norm--and that is where the extra "dimmers" were coming from?); or you have a LOT more dimmers than you are going to use so you just put each instrument in its own dimmer rather than 2-fering in the air. ...
We have ~40 plugs on the bars, and only 24 channels, so we Hard Patch the plugs into our 24 channel CD80 pack.
For the next show I do, I may do some basic soft-patching(so we don't 2fer 4 lights into a 2.1Kw dimmer like we did last time ), but I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the school who's read the whole manual and knows what a softpatch is/how to use it.
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