Syphon and Output Mapping

Past a single fullscreen display, RENDERWAVE can hand its frame to other software over Syphon, crop and rotate the output, and push the same visual to more than one screen at once. This page covers all three and how they interact.

Send a Syphon feed

Open Settings → Output → BROADCAST and switch on Syphon Output.

Note

Syphon is a Studio license feature. On a Free license the toggle is disabled and shows “Syphon requires Studio access.” Everything else on this page (output mapping, additional output surfaces) works on any license.

Once enabled, RENDERWAVE publishes a Syphon server that Resolume, MadMapper, OBS, and any other Syphon-aware app on the same Mac can pick up as a video source:

• Syphon Server Name. The name other apps see in their Syphon source list. Set something you’ll recognize if you’re running more than one Mac or more than one instance.
• Preserve Resolution. On, the Syphon feed matches your render resolution, subject to your license’s resolution cap like everything else. Off, it sends a fixed 1920×1080 feed no matter what you’re rendering at, which is lighter on bandwidth and GPU when the receiving app doesn’t need full resolution.
• Flip Vertical. Some receiving apps expect the frame flipped on the Y axis. Flip it here instead of correcting for it downstream.

A status line under the toggle tells you what’s actually happening: Syphon stopped, Syphon running: <server name>, or Syphon failed with the reason if the server couldn’t start.

Note

Syphon always sends the clean, full master frame. It ignores the crop and rotation you set up in Output Mapping below; if you need a cropped or rotated feed inside Resolume or MadMapper, do that crop in the receiving app.

Crop and rotate the output

The OUTPUT MAPPING section, just above Broadcast in the same tab, controls what portion of the frame actually gets sent to your displays.

Turn on Enable Output Mapping and a preview appears with a draggable rectangle. Drag the edges, corners, or the whole box to select the region of the frame you want to send out. This helps when your projector or LED wall doesn’t need the full canvas, or when you’re mapping onto an oddly shaped surface. Reset Mapping snaps it back to the full frame. Below the preview, X, Y, W, and H fields let you set the exact pixel region instead of dragging.

Output Rotation rotates the mapped region 0–360°, for rigs where the projector or LED processor is mounted sideways or upside down.

Circular Ceiling Mapping suits dome and ceiling installs. Switching it on turns on output mapping and resets the crop to the full frame, giving the mapping engine a clean full-frame source.

Note

Output mapping applies everywhere except Syphon: the main preview, the fullscreen external display, and every additional output surface below all honor the same crop and rotation. Syphon stays a clean, unmapped master feed.

Driving more than one screen

For LED walls, multi-projector rigs, or any setup where one Mac needs to feed more than one physical output, use Output Surfaces.

Open the EFFECTS panel in Performance view and expand DISPLAY EFFECTS. The Output Surfaces section lists every extra output window you’ve configured, with an Add Output button to create a new one. Each surface gets its own row:

• Label: a name you assign, editable inline.
• Enable toggle and a delete (trash) button.
• Mode: Fullscreen takes over a whole display; Windowed opens a resizable, movable window you can place on any screen or drag into an LED processor’s capture area.
• Display: which physical screen a fullscreen surface targets.
• Scaling: Fill, Fit, or Stretch, independent per surface.

Each output surface is a passive, GPU-downscaled copy of the same master frame. RENDERWAVE renders your visual once and scales that render per output. Adding a second or third output window is cheap and won’t cost you the frame rate that rendering the scene twice would.

Note

The crop rectangle from Output Mapping is global, not per-surface: every output surface and the main external display show the same cropped region, each just scaled to fit its own window or screen. RENDERWAVE doesn’t currently let you assign a different crop to each output surface. If your LED wall needs different content on different tiles, split that downstream in your LED processor or a mapping tool fed by the Syphon output above.

Next steps

• Output window: the basics of opening fullscreen output and closing it safely.
• Performance and resolution: set render resolution and keep frame rate steady across multiple outputs.
• Troubleshooting: for output or performance issues that don’t resolve here.