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April 2002|For six weeks we watched the sky and waited. Yes, we got other things done: we went to work, gathered materials, and made ready. But at the edge of everything, there was the want of snow. The snow did not fall to suit our schedule or to make our Christmas white. But when it did come, we set upon it like Whos on Roast Beast and built our sledding Mesopotamia on the hill, high above the hollow where the rivers meet. John Ruskin said, "When we build, let us think that we build forever." But Ruskin was not making Mesopotamia out of snow. Because as inevitably as spring, our Mesopotamia melts and we turn our minds to other things until next year when the snow comes again. And though each year this scene plays out—watching, waiting, building, playing—each time it is new and the memory of last year's Mesopotamia fades with the snow. Memories work like that. Without tending and occasional exposure to the light, they lose focus and clarity. Yes, there are the things we never forget, but after a time, the scene that plays in our heads begins to drop frames and grow choppy. Sometimes a trigger, like the smell of apple cider or the sound of a familiar tune, will set the mental scene in motion, but nothing brings it all back the way images do. I guess that is why we document our lives with pictures and home movies—because it allows us to take our memories out, dust them off, and keep them fresh in our minds. For the professional, memory is more than sentimental; it is essential. The digital era has provided us with an unprecedented ability to document and share still and moving pictures and to store and re-purpose content in order to save and make money. Why not create training videos and serve them over the network whenever they are needed? Why not make those product demos available to potential buyers via the Internet? The opportunities created also necessitate a need to record, store, and distribute ever-larger amounts of data. The paths that this digital era has forged are accessible to consumers and professionals alike and the demands of these groups are rapidly dovetailing. While professionals design, store, and deliver content on a larger scale, tools once limited to the pros have made their way into the hands of the masses. The big technology players know this and these days they strive to deliver solutions simultaneously to entry and enterprise-level customers. Sony is no stranger to this approach, as it is a name associated as readily with major motion pictures as TV sets, with broadcast cameras as home movie cameras. Now that the name of the game is digital, Sony has tried to stay ahead of the pack with each successive generation of digital devices and requisite memory solutions. And with its own favored contender among the mobile memory entries, the gumstick-sized Memory Stick, Sony believes they have found a fit to suit the entire portable storage spectrum. Memory Past
With the first generation of digital cameras, Sony generated a great deal of excitement when the company introduced its FD Mavica, which could record directly to a floppy disk that users could pop out and play back in virtually any PC. However, at 1.5MB, there was not a whole lot of room for this to be more than a consumer application and certainly little opportunity for use in the video community. Then, a few years later, Sony built on the success of its first Digital Mavica by introducing a version that burned directly to an 8mm CD. The CD Mavica writes its images directly to 156MB (8cm) CD-R or CD-RW discs. This allows for storage of up to 160 pictures at 1600x1200 resolution. It also provides MPEG (MPEG HQ) modes MPEG-Video recording. The latest craze in removable storage falls under the general heading of CompactFlash cards, which are solid state—meaning they contain no moving parts, which gives them less opportunity for failure—and provide users with much greater protection of their data than conventional magnetic disk drives. They are also small, approximately one-third the size of a PC card, and weigh about half an ounce. Another factor that distinguishes CompactFlash cards from other types other removable storage options is that they have their own controller on-board. Thus, cameras, PDAs, and other devices that use the cards are not burdened with the controller software. SanDisk developed the CompactFlash standard in 1994. According to Mark Lewis, the company's director of retail marketing, the goal was "to produce a small, low-powered, removable, solid state storage device for portable products with the intention of replacing film, tape, and other media." CompactFlash consists of a small circuit board with Flash-memory chips and a dedicated controller chip, all encased in a rugged shell. Sony got into the flash memory game with its own device, Memory Stick, in 1998. It differs from CompactFlash in shape—it is rectangular while CompactFlash is square—and in pin connection. CompactFlash uses a 50-pin connector and Memory Stick employs a 10-pin connector. Currently, five types of media compete in the removable flash market: CompactFlash, MultiMedia, Secure Digital Flash Card, Smart Media, and Sony's Memory Stick. SanDisk manufactures all of them. Lewis says they added Memory Stick to the fold last November because "it made sense from a competition standpoint." He also believes that, while there is room in the market for this many options now, that the ranks will thin and Memory Stick, along with CompactFlash and Secure Digital, will be around for the long haul. While the various flavors of CompactFlash have found predominant use in digital cameras, Sony put the full heft of its marketing and manufacturing machine behind Memory Stick to diversify its application base. According to Sony, Memory Stick, unlike other flash memory cards, was designed with more than digital camera memory in mind. According to Michael Kahn, marketing manager for Sony's digital imaging products division, "Memory Stick originally came out of the digital imaging group in Japan. While the original concept was storage," he says, "we quickly saw beyond storing data and started looking at interlinking devices." Thus, Memory Stick aspires to be more than removable storage, but rather to be a universal media that allows users to record, transfer, and share various types of digital content, such as still and moving images, music, voice, and computer data and applications. According to David Yang, public relations manager for Sony Electronics, over 200 companies are already supporting Memory Stick and 15 million Memory Stick products are on the market today in devices ranging from PDAs and printers to CD recorders and DVD players. "The Memory Stick format itself is a little under three years old," Yang points out, "and in that timeframe we've captured a 26 to 27 percent flash media market share." Memory Stick and The Making Of Mesopotamia
Every year, after the first big snow, my husband and I shed any semblance of maturity, gather up the shovels, blow up the snow tubes, and build a sledding/ sliding/snowboarding course in the yard. We have come to call it sledding Mesopotamia because it is a creation of such elaborate proportions that, while lacking the cultural (much less archeological) significance of its namesake (being perhaps closer to the grave of civilization than the cradle), it has taken on a mythical quality rivaling the hanging gardens, if only to us. This year, in our preparations, we also gathered up a pile of Memory Stick devices and decided to make a short documentary of Mesopotamia's planning, building, and shenanigans using only Memory Stick-equipped devices. (For the record, I'd like to state that, while I have three years experience building sledding Mesopotamia, I have absolutely no movie-making experience whatsoever.) We began with Sony's PDA, the Clié, which operates under the Palm OS and provides more organizational functionality than even a plan-a-holic like me would ever need. The Memory Stick slot did allow for familiar removable-media storage and file transfer (especially handy because the Clié is also a digital audio player and music is a great enhancement for labor and play alike). But true to Sony's credo, it did more. The Memory Stick Slot and its 10-pin connector allow for add-on devices to "port" into the Clié. In this case, we could add on a little Get Smart-esque Memory Stick camera module to take medium- to low-resolution digital pictures. Then, we just swapped the camera for a Memory Stick, moved the files to the stick and transferred them to any other of the myriad Memory Stick-slot devices for manipulation or printing. (The Clié itself offers color display of both still and motion images.) When combined with wireless Internet access, this tiny add-on could provide any number of useful applications for location scouting, storyboarding, and the like. Clié in pocket (loaded up with snow-play-inspiring tunes), we began to build. We shot stills using the Sony Cyber-shot (DSC-P5) and video using the Sony Mini DV Handycam (DCR-TRV30). Actually, both cams shoot still and video at resolutions from email quality-low to professional level-high. The video cameras did both motion and stills impressively, to my surprise. In the past, it had been regarded as gospel in digital photography circles that you needed separate still and video cameras because though they could do both, video cameras just didn't take very good stills and vice versa. The still camera, while it has the distinct advantage in size since it is smaller than my hand, couldn't compete with its three-times-bigger brother's video quality, but it also provided significantly higher resolution options than the video camera for stills. Both cameras ship with low-capacity Memory Sticks. However, using the highest capacity 128MB Memory Stick, (sold separately for about $90) with the Cyber-shot in Memory Stick mode at the highest resolution (2048x1536, Fine) you can store 80 images. In HQ (high-quality) MPEG movie mode, the Cyber Shot will store about five minutes of video at 640x480 resolution. The Handycam will shoot stills at up to 1360x1020 and, at its Super Fine setting, will record 143 images to the 128MB stick. But that's not the cool part. That same 128MB stick, which in the "Making of Mesopotamia" project I never filled to capacity in a single session, could be swapped between both cameras while shooting. It could also be swapped to the Clié and used to print stills directly from Sony's Digital Photo Printer—all with no intermediary PC interaction. The Memory Stick generates its own file structure so that when the user is ready to access particular files, they are sifted into neat little folders for easy moving, manipulating, and managing.
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