So Beijing has hit it’s “getting hot” time of year during which the temperature goes from “It’s nice outside” to “Get me out of the sun!” very quickly. Smoggy days have been at a minimum as of late, and that’s good, because I’ve found it’s been leading to some breathing problems for me this year, though not entirely sure why. In any event, in case you missed my last post, I wrote up and posted quite a few pictures of our day out at Yu Yuan Tan Park for the cherry blossoms that were very shortly in bloom. You can see that post here. Meanwhile, the job itself has pulled back a little bit for the month of May so I’ll have a bit more time to get a few other projects done.
And what are those projects?
Well, you might recall that I was once a budding young musician and filmmaker back in my Winnipeg days. Now that I’m older and have travelled quite a bit and have scads of gigabytes of photos and videos, I thought I should start making my way through them. Though these days I’m hardly budding, hardly young, and it can be argued whether or not I’m a musician and/or a filmmaker. So it goes.
But I have been chipping away at it and spending my free time on a few different things:
First, I’m continuing with my Mandarin Chinese studies. I’m currently on Unit 15 of the HSK 3 book. After I finish this level I will take a break from formal study and concentrate on grammar, speaking and reading real-life Chinese.
Next, I’ve been digging into finances as of late, notably how to manage my money and do it in a tax-efficient manner. Apparently it’s not quite clear cut whether or not I am a Canadian resident for tax purposes so this is something else I need to look into and its implications.
Thirdly, video editing. Although the basics of video editing haven’t changed, the tools have certainly improved. I used to edit on desktop computer (remember those?) but now I’m on a laptop and it is a on-brainer to learn the keyboard shortcuts so I can speed through editing. The switchover to Final Cut Pro X from Adobe Premiere Pro wasn’t overly difficult, mainly because it’s been such a long time since I’ve properly edited videos. For those of you wondering, video editing isn’t overly difficult but it does take a lot of time, especially once you get down to the detailing stage of the edit (what’s appropriately known as the “final cut”).
And there’s older footage, like the time I went scuba diving in the Philippines:
You can see how simple my edits are for these videos. And I don’t mind. If travelling has taught me anything, it’s that I need to keep it as simple as possible. Splice, dissolve, title, soundtrack, export, upload, share.
And the fourth project keeping me busy is probably my newest challenge yet: audio editing, for which I’m using Logic Pro X.
And this is what I look like when I open Logic Pro X:
I’ve never really worked with audio editors before, usually just using whatever film program I had. For those of you thinking “Why doesn’t he use Audacity” (a free, open-source audio editing program), it’s because Audacity, in some respects, is even more complicated and doesn’t have nearly the same amount of features that Logic has. And that’s what I’m going through now. EQ’ing this, limiting that, mixing these levels to -3dB and bouncing these through buses going over there through here and this gate, too. Lots of mumbo jumbo so far. But, I’m not daunted, particularly because the projects I’m working on don’t have a deadline and, more importantly, it’s probably worth more for me to figure this stuff out than to have someone do it for me.
Hey, what happened to all of those other programs you were going to try to learn? Unity? Artificial Intelligence? PHP coding?
Unity I replaced with focusing more on Blender, which is a free, open-source digital animation program and, as far as I can tell, whatever I learn in that program could be transferred over to Motion, which is Apple’s animation program. Why these two? Because Motion can create text graphics and animated title cards for videos and what not, so, in that sense, it makes more sense to concentrate on building up that skill set.
I took an interest in Artificial Intelligence because I thought I could start programming my laptop to do a few different tasks for me, notably uploading or downloading images, putting them in the appropriate folders, and renaming them as necessary. Turns out it’s a little bit more complicated than that and, moreover, Apple includes an automation program with their operating system, so it would make more sense to focus on woking with this guy rather than learning the whole theory behind machine learning, artificial intelligence, and so on. Even still, I can do what I need to do quicker than I can learn how to teach my computer to do it. Clear?
And then the PHP coding. I started going through PHP tutorials and other resources thinking that I could somehow help reconstruct this here website and/or begin work on mobile apps, but, getting into the nitty gritty of developing apps is a little bit more involved than simply having an interest. Further, although it is possible to build an app by one’s lonesome self, updating it, maintaining it, and ensuring compatibility across the range of platforms currently available make it a little bit of a uphill battle. And not a battle I need to fight right now. This is something I can learn the principles over time so I’m at least aware of the possibilities when and should the time come that I need to develop an app.
And so that’s what’s keeping me busy these days. Here’s to getting more posts up in the near future!