Re: The Shimmers, Flickers and Sparkles

Add the Gaussian blur in the vertical direction only, around 0.001 to 0.003.

If the images are too large in size (i.e. pixels), reduce their size helps a lot.
Are you doing any panning and/or zooming on the images?
If not, reduce them to your project size (720 x 480 for NTSC DV).

Here's another suggestion I grabbed a long time ago.
In an overexposed or underexposed image, you want to affect all the pixels in the image equally.
Follow these steps to fix an overexposed image.
1. Duplicate the background layer into a new layer.
2. Put the new layer in Multiply mode.
This will intensify the saturation of the image.
Not enough? Duplicate the multiplied layer again, until you get the results you want.

Underexposed images are handled the same way except you put the new layer in Screen mode instead of Multiply.