Brain strain #2 - Mr MXF

A calming picture of Ozzy at the bottom of my stairs, September 2019

When I've mentioned that I'm doing some work for Mr MXF, it's not surprising that people have asked what it is that I'm doing. They have had to make do with very scanty information up to now, including the phrase "it's complicated." Well, I'm going to put that right, here and now.

So, let me see. It's complicated.

Mr MXF did the same engineering degree as me 35 years ago, and he must have enjoyed it more than I did, and understood quite a lot more than I did, because unlike me he then went on to apply what he had learned to the world of the electronics and technology standards that sit behind our broadcast services. Back then it was the BBC. Nowadays it's Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Fox, YouTube, IMAX, TV, and the little screen on the back of the plane seat in front of you.

MXF stands for Material eXchange Format, and it is one of those technology standards. From what I understand, Mr MXF had quite a key role in creating the standard, and I think it's quite an important standard, and now I'm guessing that it would be a good thing if all these different media and film people told their technologists to use the standard. 

The standard relates to the fact that broadcast media, let's just say movies to make things a bit simpler, are predominantly distributed in digital format. Their destination is the cinema, or your television, or your desktop, laptop or tablet computer, or your smartphone, or the little screen on the back of the plane seat in front of you. All of those different devices have to know how to deliver the digital information contained in the film in a way that your device can display on its screen. So the same film content may need to be encoded in a different way for all of these platforms.

Then there are different soundtracks and languages and subtitles and audio description. Different countries may demand certain material to be cut, or added - the actual content and running time of a movie on a plane may be different from the same movie shown in a cinema which may be different again from the version you stream or download from the Internet. 

Putting all this together, there may be a hundred different versions of a movie. And what you don't want is to have to digitally store each of those versions in their entirety. Digital storage costs money, and some versions may never be needed, and 90% or more of the digital content will be the same, it's only the language, or that 3 minute scene in the middle that had to be cut for the China market, or the Netflix anti-theft coding (now I'm making things up) that will be different.

So what I think the MXF standard does is to allow the core content of the movie to be stored once, and all the adjustments and differences to be stored once, and when a particular version is needed, all the right pieces are put together to make the version that is delivered. And Mr MXF is the Standards Vice President for the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (a voluntary, unpaid post), and at the same time sells his consultancy - a unique blend of knowledge, creativity, enthusiasm, silliness and wisdom. And you also need to know that everything I have written in this post so far may be completely wrong. We didn't even do the same engineering degree - our choices in the third year were very different.

So what am I doing for Mr MXF?

It all boils down to the fact that Mr MXF is very good at what he does and probably has even more ideas than I do (and I have a lot of ideas) but only a certain amount of time to do things. However, I have time to do some of the things that Mr MXF does not have time to do but are within the scope of someone who has no broadcast technology knowledge or experience but quite a lot of brain that isn't being used to its fullest extent. And he only has a certain amount of money to spare, and I only have a certain amount of time to spare, and at the moment those two match up quite nicely.

So Mr MXF came up with a long list of things that he wants to do but doesn't have time for, and we skimmed through them together with me making notes like my life depended upon it, because while I have a lot of brain that isn't being used to its fullest extent, actually using it to its fullest extent is a challenge all of a sudden. And I chose a few different tasks to have a go at, and it's been incredibly satisfying to stretch my brain.

We have had some follow up conversations, and Mr MXF is quite good at supplying as much information as my brain can take, and then shoves a bit more in. I get a particular sensation at the point of overload which I tend to describe as my brain melting out of my ears (although that's not what the sensation is like). Then I go away and try to make sense of it, and send some stuff over for Mr MXF to have a look at, and I'm pleased to report that so far it has turned out to be what he was hoping for.

I've had a go at three projects so far. One was around a set of short educational films, three to four minutes long, which need to be advertised and then delivered to a number of platforms (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter). After I'd rummaged around the equivalent of the back of the bins in Instagram alone I'd already lost the will to live, and we decided that perhaps this job wasn't for me. But the other two are going well.

One project is essentially a database of everything relating to the MXF standard - other standards, conference papers, journal articles, talks, everything. The idea is that not only will I assemble and collate all this stuff, but it will form a searchable resource, and to do this I have had to learn new things - JSON coding and Visual Code Studio and Github for starters. You don't need to know what they are, and I'm pretty sure most people would find it as uninteresting as I found Instagram, but I like it.

I've only just started on the other project, which involves Mail Hosting. On the face of it this is terrifying - having had to dig under the surface of Outlook mail for mum and dad I have met some of the deranged horrors that lurk in that abode. One misplaced digit and your email initiates a nuclear explosion in a poverty-stricken third world country instead of being delivered to the room next door. Or, more likely, your email just stops working.

Anyway, I dipped my toe very gently into a package called Postmark, which has the most comprehensive and well-written tutorials I have ever encountered, so I have a good feeling so far. What this package does is help you with 'transactional email' - messages that are sent to an individual that the individual is expecting. Like confirmation of a password reset, or an order confirmation, or a welcome email when you sign up for something. Mr MXF hosts a number of different websites, and getting the transactional email set up more robustly is a pressing need.

Then there is mail forwarding, which allows a message sent to a generic mailbox to be forwarded automatically to the people who need to see it - imagine what happens to the message addressed to 'sales@company.com' or 'info@company.com'. I have started to investigate Pobox, whose tutorials and FAQs are not as good as Postmark, but it's early days.

So that's where I am so far, and to be honest I'd like to spend more time on this part of my busy life, but what with camping and my Buddhist retreat and supervising the plumbers (update: still no wet room) and my diabetes work I haven't had as much time as I thought I would. So I'm going to stop writing this blog and give my brain a little more exercise now.