I’m new here and I want to stream visuals for some songs during a concert, and use TagTool for live animation on others.
I have an iPad and a MacBook Pro where I have OBS Studio installed.
I’m making the connections with QuickTime, but the problem is that it copies everything from TagTool, including the color panel, decks, and user space.
My goal is to only show the output area, that is, the final canvas. Does anyone know how to do this or have another solution?
QuickTime’s “New Movie Recording” method mirrors your entire iPad screen — it’s a screen mirror, not a video output capture. So you inevitably see Tagtool’s UI (color panel, decks, user space) alongside the canvas.
Option 1 — NDI (Wireless or Wired Network) Stream your canvas directly to OBS via Tagtool’s built-in NDI feature. Just go to the Main Menu and enable “Start NDI Server”. The quality depends on your connection: a wired Ethernet cable can handle Full HD, while a fast 5 GHz Wi-Fi connection should manage 720p comfortably.
Option 2 — HDMI Capture Card (Wired) Connect your iPad to your Mac using an HDMI adapter (Apple and third-party options exist for both Lightning and USB-C iPads), then capture the signal on your Mac with a video capture device such as a Blackmagic or Elgato card.
Download the free Tagtool Desktop app for Mac from the Tagtool website and run it on your MacBook. Then, on your iPad, join it as a multiplayer session over your local network — your iPad stays in control of all the drawing and animation as usual, while the Mac becomes the video output host.
On the Mac side, go to Main Menu → Start Syphon Server. This streams the canvas at full resolution with low latency — and also includes transparency (alpha channel) like NDI — to any Syphon-compatible app running on the same computer. To bring it into OBS, install the free OBS Syphon plugin, which lets you add the Tagtool canvas as a source directly in your scene.