I Output the show to an open PRE9 Timeline, added my usual front and end material, then played it back -- as usual, without first rendering it -- and the playback was smooth.
Then I "shared" the Timeline to a HDD (Personal Computer) as an MPEG2 1080i 30 but made the following changes on the Advance Button before burning: Quality 5, VBR, 2 Pass. I made no changes to the audio preset.
What I cannot comprehend is: Why is it that, when I play the MPEG2 file wiith either Windows Media Viewer or Media Center, both the video and, especially, the audio are magnitudes of order better than when I played back the PRE9 timeline? If the answer is that the video looks better because it has been rendered during encoding, how to explain that the audio, especially, sounds so much better?
Related question: Why is it that, when I use iTunes to convert an mp3 to a WAV file -- which causes it to "grow" from 3-4mb to 30-40 mb -- it, too, sounds so much better? Once a file has been compressed to mp3, shouldn't the material that was lost during the compression process be permanently unrecoverable?
