I imagine so, but wouldn't this be at the expense of quality?

This isn't really my biggest problem though. Hopefully someone can shed some light on this one.....

I demuxed an ac3 of the whole movie and then split it into 6 wav files.

There seems to be some missing audio following the split, which I noticed when I got to the bit with Zam Wessell getting shot by the poison dart. There is no longer a "whoosh" noise of the dart flying through the air, or even an impact noise. All we see is the dart impacting completely silently, and then zam making some very fake sounding choking noises.

The noise was present in the AC3. I checked. I followed adigitalman's guide to the letter several times and it seems the sound in this part (and i can assume other parts) is missing each time.

Is there something glaringly obvious I'm missing? Like extra channels? I thought there were only 6....

EDIT: Never mind. I found out via an export that the sound is actually there in channels 5 and 6 but just wasn't previewing in my timeline for whatever reason. Maybe I need to render the audio before it can preview that many channels.

I'm still learning my way around this program so sorry if i seem like a dummy! I'm planning some intensive editing over the next few days to get things back on track. I'm already finding editing with 6 channels a joy compared to before, and am amazed at what can be accomplished through tinkering with the discrete elements. Starting from scratch in another program may have been the best thing I ever did :)

It won't be long before all I have left to do is colour correct and learn after effects, at which point I'd appreciate any help!