garageCube

[xrchitect]

I have 12 siphon in's from Touch Designer coming into MM, as well as 15 other video playing locally within MM, using MM as the final compositor before it goes to an ultrawide screen canvas of 12 HD projectors (3 4K datapath outs). It's starting to hit some performance concerns.

Can I enable Siphon Out to export 10 minutes of video, and will that produce a perfect carbon copy that can replay the performance in my hall? ie, this MM export could replace my siphons and other videos, and I could use this export from now on? Theres no cues, no interactions in my setup, its just a stream of 30fps video.

If thats the case, I may go through all my projects and render 10-minutes of each project, that way its easy to switch between them when clients ask

[littlejohn]

My first question is would it not be easier to render the video out in touchdesigner? You can turn off realtime mode and render to a video file so it will just be playing back if you have no other interactions in your performance, admitedly TD is a little hard work to map to irregular surfaces compared to MM, so if you have some mapping requirements then by all means use Madmapper for that, but ideally render down your video so there is no realtime processing and then you can turn off touchdesigner and playback everything in MM.
And in answer to your question Syphon is:

Hardware accelerated surface sharing on the GPU where it belongs.
Zero latency.
Zero copy.
Support arbitrary resolutions up to your GPU’s limit. Typically 16k x 16k.
Support abritrary frame rates.
Support alpha-channels.

Hope that helps!

[xrchitect]

Thanks littlejohn! thats a great idea to just render it all at once in Touchdesigner. And I could turn the TD realtime flag off so no dropped frames just incase.

[Firefly_199x]

Hi Xrchitect,
Syphon Out in MadMapper doesn’t directly export video but can be used with a tool like Syphon Recorder to capture a 10-minute performance as a single file, perfectly replicating your 12 Syphon inputs and 15 local videos. This exported video can replace your current setup, simplifying playback and resolving performance issues for your ultrawide 12-projector canvas.
Chill Guy Game

[Gelaopera]

My first question is would it not be easier to render the video out in touchdesigner? You can turn off realtime mode and render to a video file so it will just be playing back if you have no other interactions in your performance, admitedly TD is a little hard work to map to irregular surfaces compared to MM, so if you have some mapping requirements then by all means use Madmapper for that, but ideally render down your video so there is no realtime processing and then you can turn off touchdesigner and playback everything in MM. Geometry Dash
And in answer to your question Syphon is:

Hardware accelerated surface sharing on the GPU where it belongs.
Zero latency.
Zero copy.
Support arbitrary resolutions up to your GPU’s limit. Typically 16k x 16k.
Support abritrary frame rates.
Support alpha-channels.

Hope that helps!

TouchDesigner is incredibly powerful but can be overkill if you're simply playing back pre-rendered content. As mentioned, its mapping capabilities for irregular surfaces aren't quite as user-friendly as MadMapper’s, so if your performance involves complex surface mapping, it makes sense to shift that part of the workflow to MM.

Now, regarding your actual question about Syphon — it’s important to clarify that Syphon Out is not a clone of the original video in the traditional sense of file duplication. Rather, it's a real-time shared texture on the GPU. It doesn’t duplicate or compress the video like a typical file copy. Instead, it allows another application (like MadMapper) to access that texture instantly and without latency, thanks to GPU-level surface sharing.