I have been a board up and ME for many years. I have worked with more designers then I can count and the one thing you can be sure of is that there is no industry standard on how to patch. I have found that Dance shows tend to
channel DSL-USR wheras Concerts and Plays seem to be more often DSR-USL. I believe this is based on the viewpoint of the "Designer". Dance is designed from the
stage or from the Choreographers perspective and everything else is usually done from
FOH or the LDs perspective.
This does not always hold true though and I have seen all manners of channeling including a patch where the channels on the
screen resembled the
plot and
stage layout. This meant that the channels were in the same relative position on the
screen as the actual lights were over the
stage. This designer also seperated out different systems by
page so that he could simply
page through the systems to see what was up and where.
I have adapted alot of these concepts into how I design and I actually use DSR-USL for most things so that I can tell from the booth which light is SL or SR easily. I also tend to run my front light starting with Ch 1 and try and seperate my areas into 5s so I can keep my next
system in the same group of numbers. ie 1-20,21-41
etc... When you get into booms I prefer to
channel all the top units on one side of the
stage before all the top units on the other side. It helps in bringing up channels 81-84 instead of 81 + 83 + 85 + 87 just to get one side of side light.