It sounds like what you're talking about is a
Track Sheet - see this link for some examples from days gone by:
Theatrical Lighting Database
These were used in the past because they were what the board operators followed when they were manually setting
channel levels for each
cue for each performance. I'd be very surprised if anyone doing a show on a modern memory
console still did this. Generally speaking, there's so much data contained in each
cue (discreet timings, marking,
preheat, focus/color/beam data, links and follows, and so on) that writing everything out would be nearly impossible. On long-running Broadway-style shows, the show file is the only complete record of the cues - generally, the LD and
ALD keep one each, the
Production Electrician has one, there's 2 or more in the
theatre, and at least a few more scattered among producers,
stage managers, and maybe a safe somewhere. The idea being that, no matter what happened to the
venue or any individual, there would be plenty of copies remaining.
However, most Broadway-style shows will do a fairly detailed
tracking of Moving Lights via FileMaker Pro or another similar program. Most ALDs I've met have their own extremely intricate and complicated FileMaker Pro
template that they use for
tracking every time a ML comes up, where it's pointing, what color it's in, and everything about it. While the
console does provide this data, it's usually not
clear what the numbers are intended to represent (colors/gobos could be swapped,
blocking could change, scenery may be modified, and so on). Often these are also paired with a photo-record of every
cue, as well as every ML (and usually
conventional) focus and
preset.
Hope that helps.