Hi,

I'm about to purchase a Macbook Pro, 2.5 GHz 15"

However, my main concern is that it only has 1 firewire port. Can a firewire hub or soemthing be used to split the output so that I can connect an old analogue Mojo and a firewire drive simultaneously?

Also, does anyone have experience running Avid on a Windows installation on one of these new MacBook Pros? And using the VMFusion?

Thanks

The best way to go if I recall the more experienced editors on this site, is to plug the Mojo into the MacBook Pro firewire port and then purchase a FW Expresscard with preferably 2 FW connectors and attached the external HDD to it. I've heard that the Mojo will not work with the card slot.

Steve

Hi LongTimeAvidUser,

Also just remembered that the Mojo does not like sharing the FW bus it is connected to. Some of the other editors may be able to give you more info. I have never used a Mojo first hand.

In regard to running MS Windows with Avid on the Mac, when you buy the Macbook Pro on will get a program called Bootcamp which allows you to setup the mac with both OSX and Windows/Vista as a bootable option.

Steve.

Hi. Stephen is abolutely correct!!!!  The Mojo won't work unless iit is on the native FW Bus!!!!!!!! I just went through this myself!!!!!!

Kent

The MacBook Pro actually has two FireWire ports--1 FW400 and one FW800.

I have had absolutely no problems connecting a Mojo (analog) to the FW400 port and digitizing to a drive connected to the FW800 port.  In fact, I am doing that right now on this very computer (a MacBook Pro 17" 2.33GHz, with 3GB RAM).  Avid will happily digitize in the background while I'm doing something else.

If your drive only has FW400 connections, you can get a cable to adapt your FW800 port to fit the drive.  I would suggest trying this method before putting in a FireWire ExpressCard.  Unfortunately, my experience has been that ExpressCard support on the Mac isn't all that great.  I have an eSATA card that I
 use sometimes, and once it is up and running it works great (significantly faster than FW800 too, according to XBench).  Only problem is, occasionally inserting the card will cause the laptop to freeze completely, requiring a hard reset.  Not a huge deal, but if you can use the built in FireWire ports I'd say go for that.

Edit: Should mention that I'm capturing over component, not 1394 on the Mojo.  I don't know whether I can capture using the 1394 connection or not, but I've had trouble with trying to do that before with a Mojo connected (even trying the Mojo and the deck on separate buses).  This project is a 24p project, so I wasn't able to capture over the 1394 port anyway, but if you had to do that you could always disconnect the Mojo and connect the deck to the FireWire port, I guess.  YMMV, of course.