10 Kg

Yep, 10Kg, that’s how much weight I’ve lost recently.

Why? Well, because I was getting to be an overweight geek, despite all my half-assed efforts to turn up the exercise —it just won’t happen! :-)

Overweight to about 7-8Kg in fact. So what did I do? Well, I finally caved in to my wife’s requests and decided to take care of it.

After making that decision I talked to my uncle who’s recently lost something like 20Kg (!!) and asked for his advice which, like any good engineer’s advice, is plain common sense.

The magic formula (heh) is simple: ingest less calories than you spend in order to reduce body mass and then start ingesting a bit more to maintain it. Also, if you want to help the weight loss process, make sure you burn up more calories than usual, faster.

So after a full two months of sensible eating (absolutely no candy, no sugary drinks, no alcohol, no fats, no more than 100g of meat or fish a day, eating regularly thru-out the day and a few other obvious measures) aided by a daily walk or jog of at least 6-7 Kms I’ve come to weigh 10Kg less than I started out with.

Then I stopped the daily exercise and eased up on the eating regime to see how it would work out and now that I’m eating comfortably (I was never a big eater to start with, so that helps, of course) ;-) and haven’t exercised for a few weeks, I’ve settled in a nice weight (I’ve gained an average of 1,5Kg during these weeks but it varies daily, of course).

Now that I’ve gotten to where I want to settle from now on, I’ll just keep on monitoring the weight and being mildly careful with my intake (as I’ve been on the last few weeks) and that’s it.

All it took was a little self-discipline to follow my eating regime with absolute strictness for a couple of months (and let me tell you, it’s not me I have to worry about here, it’s other people around me who get so uncomfortable with my “diet” that they’ll constantly try to make me break it. Funny, huh?) and then a little care afterwards to keep up the shape.

It’s not rocket science, it wasn’t that hard and it sure was no drama. Like everything else in life, all it took was to make the decision to do something about it, make a plan and then to go for it.

And in the end I’m not doing any great sacrifices on my daily life, I’m just eating sensibly. After all, when was the last time I had to stock up on calories to push through a tough winter of walking around fleeing tigers and hunting bears for food? ;-)

Multicamera editing in Final Cut

I’m back at Final Cut.

After reading some stuff on film editing it sure is a lot easier to figure the software out. I guess it is true that this is professional software and it is not that easy to just take it up and start editing away…

Anyway I took it up again because I have an event filmed from which I want to make a DVD and I had access to two tapes from different people, both of which had some kind of problems with it so even if I wanted to (and I didn’t) I couldn’t just cop out and use only one of them for the whole event. Consumer-grade mini-DV cameras absolutely suck in low-light conditions

So I just read through the FCP manual where it regards to creating, manipulating and editing multiclips and then after I had all of the clips synchronized into different angles of the same clip I just edited it like one would a live show with multiple cameras’ signals coming in. It just rocks!

Of course, manually synching different video feeds when you have no strong visual or audio clues (like a clacker for example, which I now do get the need for, by the way…) is a pain and the only thing that made it easier on me was that fortunately one of the persons filming the event left the camera on for the whole duration so I had a continuos video feed to synch up the other person’s interrupted footage.

All in all I haven’t finished editing everything yet but the main event clip (the only one which is multi-angle) is coming along quite nicely indeed, even if I do only have a rough edit so far.

Which reminds me: making rough edits with highly reduced resolution footage and then re-importing everything at full res just for the final edit and export is just great! The speed with which I can now work is amazing and then I’ll just have to do minor tweaks with the full resolution footage. Heaven! :-)

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