Hey guys,

If you were curious about learning a little more about how to take advantage of the Thunderbolt busses in the new Mac Pro, I did a Moviola Webinar on September 30th, 2014 on the subject:

http://moviola.com/webinars/understanding-the-mac-pro-for-professionals/

In general, it’s all about how to take advantage of the ports on the MP to make sure you’re getting the most out of it, and getting the largest bang for your buck. This is a follow-up to the article I wrote for FCPWORKS a little while ago- http://www.fcpworks.com/thunderbolt-bus-mapping-new-mac-pro/

Here are some tips for mapping out your thunderbolt devices across the individual buses from that piece:

• Do not attach more than 2 displays to a thunderbolt bus.  If you do, expect to see problems.
• You can connect up to 6 Thunderbolt/mini displayport displays (2 on each bus) to the new Mac Pro.
• You can connect up to 3 4k displays (1 each on buses #1 and #2) and a third through the HDMI port, which connects to the third Thunderbolt bus.
• On my setup, I have my ports configured this way: my two desktop monitors are on bus #1.  My Promise R8 and some additional thunderbolt storage is on bus #2.  My Ultrastudio 4k for video I/O is on bus #3, and I’ll connect additional drives/peripherals when necessary to this bus.

We did a nice Q&A afterwards. Take a look, I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam Mestman, FCPWORKS.

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Workflow Architect, Sam Mestman. Sam’s also a regular writer for fcp.co and MovieMaker Magazine, teaches post workflow at RED’s REDucation classes, and is the founder and CEO of We Make Movies, a film collective in Los Angeles and Toronto which is dedicated to making the movie industry not suck. If you’ve got any FCP X questions or need some help putting together a system, drop him an email at workflow@fcpworks.com and you can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

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