Accidentally lay that audio cable over a power cable? You should have picked up the low buzz if you were monitoring with headphones, but this is no time for lectures. Fortunately, there is the Hum Remover Filter (a.k.a. DeHummer). Slide the Frequency slider until you find the sweet spot. Hint: if you are in the USA, try a value of 60Hz (or 50Hz for the majority of Europe). This corresponds to the electrical power in your country (Hz AC power). The Q slider narrows the range of frequency that you can remove. If you find you are losing some valuable audio when trying to remove the hum, then try adjusting the Q.

Quite often, when returning to the edit bay to capture your footage, you'll notice an object on the edge of your frame that you know you didn't include while shooting on location. In fact, you were so careful to make sure it was just off camera. What happened? With many consumer camcorders, what you see is not what you get. They include a bit more in the frame than they are showing you in the LCD. Many television sets will lose about 10% of the image around the edges of the frame, so camcorders add that 10% when you shoot. But, if you're editing for the internet, your audience will see that extra real estate. Go into the Motion area of a single clip, and adjust the scale slider to zoom in on the clip. The general rule is that you can zoom in about 10% without pixilating your image too severely.

An amazing new feature in Apple's Final Cut Pro 6.0 is SmoothCam. One cup of coffee too many, and that handheld shot is a bit too jittery. Smoothcam analyzes your shot and takes the shake out, while preserving the original camera movement. Pretty incredible. Adobe's After Effects has a Stabilize Motion option, and there are third-party plug-ins such as Mercalli from ProDAD, but to have it built into the program is nice. Though they are adjustable, the presets seem to work well for us.

You can cure flicker resulting from horizontal edges in interlaced video with a simple anti-flicker or flicker filter found in most editing software. We run across flickering problems in both video and stills. Remember that you can usually adjust these filters, so open the filter in your Viewer or Source windows and experiment with the settings.

One obvious omission in this article so far is Primary and Secondary Color Correction. One of the most common fixes, for amateurs and professionals alike, is color correction. You can cure improper white balance, washed-out colors or maybe not enough contrast in color correction. This is why editing software manufacturers are putting so much time, money and human power into developing comprehensive color correctors. Comprehensive to some equals confusing to others, and the color correction process is extensive. Videomaker will soon have a 2 whole columns dedicated to Color Correction, so stay tuned. In the meantime, a simple technique can be used to warm or cool your image. Use an RGB Color filter that will allow you to adjust the three color channels in video (e.g., red, green, blue). For a warmer image, drop down your blue channel a little bit; for the opposite effect, make a cooler image by dropping down the red channel.

Like most effects in video editing, accurate color correction can take some time. It can be used lightly to fix some small problems, or you can use color correction to stylize the look of your whole video.