My title does not refer to NASA or Bush and Company's newest diversion. I'm not talking about a new career employment opportunity either. I'm referring to some simple procedures to safeguard your own hard work and the work of others right here at MTN. I am referring to the use of digital editing rooms at MTN. These include Mars, Jupiter, and Star, our three beginning edit rooms, as well as our three Final Cut Pro systems. These systems are all different, but one thing they have in common is that they have hard drives. The hard drive temporarily stores your program so that you can edit it with the software on the system  - that's what non-linear editing is all about. We have been seeing some misuse of these systems from time to time.  Here's some information on how to use them properly, so please pay attention to help us cut down on future problems. The Casablanca systems have space for up to ten projects, but don't let that fool you into thinking that there is a great frontier of unused hard drive space. The hard drives on these systems are limited, and any one of those ten projects could conceivably eat up all the space. Because of this, we ask that you limit the amount of media that you record into the system. When you are ready to edit, select an unused project and label it with your name and today's date. Do not expect your project to remain indefinitely, so "back it up" by recording your work to tape before you leave the system. Try working on one small segment of a program at a time. We have had projects lost from time to time so please be careful. Only staff can delete projects from the systems. If more space is needed, staff may need to delete some projects. Improperly labeled projects will be the first to go. The next to go will be projects that have been on the system for longer than a week. Each of the rooms has the procedure typed out on a sheet of paper attached to the wall. Even the Final Cut Pro rooms have seen difficulties with this hard drive management menace.  It is even more vital when you work in these advanced rooms to know where your files are being saved, so never forget to set your scratch disk when you come in to edit. For large scale projects we encourage advanced editors to purchase their own external hard drives. This will give you the storage elbow-room you need to edit. Please read the notices on the walls of our edit rooms.  Many editors have apparently stopped seeing the signs which warn to keep ALL Food and Drink outside the edit spaces. We only have these few precious edit rooms to share between all our producers - thanks for keeping the resource available to so many by following the simple MTN rules and procedures. -Doug Cain