[Barry777]

I'm happy to say I finally got everything chasing each other, and can even use the smaller and lighter BR-S800 machines for mobile recording, then stick the tapes into the monstrous BR-S822U's for the serious editing and post production at home. Since the 800's are more of a prosumer machine, they will only generate and read 30 NDF time code. Once I prerecorded blackburst and NDF on all video tapes and formatted the ADAT tapes beforehand, everything suddenly started working properly.

The 800's only have a 6 digit readout which is kind of a pain, but the addition of either an external time code reader or the RM-G800U editing controller restores the frames readout. Looking forward to recording a friend's band in a few weeks :-)

I showed pictures of the setup to some friends at work, and their response was "You know you can get a digital this and a HD that, then you could route it through a whizbang streamer and codec the output into a pringleboozer ziptration processor, and you wouldn't need all that old heavy stuff". These are the guys who are constantly cussing and scratching their heads to work out the bugs in the new digital designs.