Most efficient way to connect multiple displays to iMac edit suite?

[Vikash2]

We are a production company and are in a bit of a pickle on how to upgrade our edit suites set up.

We have an iMac 5K and need to connect 1 additional display (4K preferred) and 1 HDMI TV. We also have one thunderbolt scratch drive which is daisy chainable (has an additional thunderbolt port).

The problem we are running into is that most solutions will consume all thunderbolt ports on the iMac or won't drive the HDMI TV.

We looked at connecting a Dell Mini DP Port Display to one thunderbolt port and daisy chaining the HDMI tv of the Dell TV using a Mini DP port to HDMI adapter but apparently this does not work.

We also looked at thunderbolt docks with HDMI, but apparently none of these docks can drive the HDMI port and Displayport at the same time.

We don't want to hook up the TV at the back of the scratch disk, because that means we have no ports left.

We are thinking of either getting an LG Thunderbolt display and connecting the TV to the daisy chainable port of the display. I read that this should work as long as you have another drive in between. So it would be iMac -> Thunderbolt Display -> Thunderbolt Scratch Disk -> Mini DP to HDMI cable. Does anyone have experience with this at all?

Or perhaps we should get a Black Magic intensity (with HDMI out) and hook that up using USB? This way we can connect the TV using USB/HDMI?

Sorry for the lengthy post. Would love to hear your thoughts or any other recommendations you might have?

 

[ColdCase]

Money not being no object, you may be able to daisy chain two TB docks and connect The HDMI monitor to one dock, the DP to the other dock at the end of the chain.

Here is some text from elgato that pretty much describes the setup. Just about any dock does this.

"There can be up to two DisplayPort signals available on the Thunderbolt bus, depending on the Mac or PC.

When the DisplayPort signals come from the computer over Thunderbolt, and travel into the Dock, one of them is demultiplexed. That DisplayPort signal is ready to be used.

The demultiplexed DisplayPort signal is translated Dock into HDMI. That leaves one DisplayPort signal still multiplexed in the Thunderbolt signal, for later use in the Thunderbolt chain.

That second DisplayPort signal can only be demultiplexed by another Thunderbolt device, like the Apple Thunderbolt Display, or by another Thunderbolt Dock."

 

[ColdCase]

Note that in this thread a poster was able to connect two displays to a single TB port by inserting another TB device in the chain:

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20955087#post20955087