On day one at a post house, someone will hand you a login, point at the shared NAS in Finder, and tell you to ask if you have questions. They will not hand you the rules for how the shared drive actually works. Those rules exist. Everyone in the building knows them. Nobody wrote them down.

This is a writeup of the unwritten ones, before you violate one and become the assistant editor who deleted the master folder for the airline campaign at 4:55pm on a Friday.

The Cardinal Rules

Like a film set has rules nobody explains until you break one (don't walk between the camera and the talent, don't touch the gaffer's stuff, don't eat the talent's food), the shared edit drive has rules that protect everyone's sanity.

Never delete on the shared drive without checking. Ever. Even files that look obviously dead. The "01_OLD_FOOTAGE_DELETE_ME" folder might be referenced in a project file you've never opened. The two-year-old folder for a client you've never heard of might be sitting in next month's pull. Move suspicious files to a _TO_REVIEW folder, message your lead, wait. Cost of waiting: zero. Cost of being wrong: a week of recovery.

Never copy huge files at 5pm. This is the politest one nobody mentions. The 5pm push is when everyone is uploading deliverables, exporting masters, or pushing to client review platforms. Starting a 200 GB transfer to or from the shared NAS during this window slows everyone down. Schedule big copies for early morning or overnight. If you must do it during the day, wait for the lull around 2pm.

Never rename top-level folders. A project folder name like 2025_NIKE_FALL_CAMPAIGN_v2_FINAL looks ugly and you will be tempted to clean it up. Don't. That folder name is referenced in project files, in delivery scripts, in the producer's calendar, and in the trafficking spreadsheet you don't have access to. The cost of "cleaning up" the name is breaking three downstream things you don't know exist.

Never put personal media on the work NAS. The vacation footage you want to edit on lunch break, the side gig you're doing for your cousin, the music videos you're cutting on weekends. None of that goes on the shared drive. The NAS is the company's storage. Personal files create capacity problems, security problems, and the very awkward conversation when someone finds your friend's wedding footage in the wrong folder.

The Naming Conventions You'll Be Expected to Know

Most post houses follow some variation of:

```

/Volumes/Projects/2026_ClientName_ProjectName/

/00_Admin/

/01_Source_Footage/

/02_Audio/

/03_Graphics/

/04_Project_Files/

/05_Exports/

/06_Deliverables/

/99_Archive/

```

The exact structure varies. The principle does not: numbered folders so they sort consistently, separation between source/working/output, a dedicated deliverables folder for finals.

Project files inside 04_Project_Files/ typically follow a pattern like:

```

ClientName_ProjectName_v01_2026-04-15_Editor.prproj

ClientName_ProjectName_v01_2026-04-15_Editor_RECOVERED.prproj

ClientName_ProjectName_v02_2026-04-16_Editor.prproj

```

Version up when you make significant changes. Date in ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD) so files sort chronologically. Editor's initials so it's clear who saved what.

Within a week of starting, learn the specific convention your shop uses. Read three or four existing project folders. Match the pattern exactly when you create new ones. You will be judged by your folder discipline. Quietly.

How to Ask Without Sounding Green

Most assistant editors are afraid to ask, so they guess wrong. The good ones learn to ask in a way that signals they've already done the basic checking.

For "where do I put this":

"Hey, I'm going to drop the new XYZ source files into /Volumes/Projects/2026_Client/01_Source_Footage/2026-04-15_Day1/. Sound right? Want me to follow a different convention?"

For "can I delete this":

"I noticed /Volumes/Projects/_OLD_2024/ is taking 3 TB. Can I move it to archive, or is it still active?"

For "is anyone using this":

"I want to start a render that touches the audio bin in the Nike project. Anyone in there right now?"

The pattern is the same: state what you intend to do, show you've identified the affected resource, ask for confirmation. It takes 10 seconds and saves the reputation hit of being the new person who broke the project.

For the "is anyone using this" question, most modern NAS dashboards have a session view (Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS all expose this). On macOS you can also run lsof | grep filename to see if a process has a file open. Knowing how to check yourself is the difference between asking once a week and asking every hour.

When You Leave a Project Mid-Edit

You will inherit projects from other editors. You will hand off projects to other editors. The handoff is where good shops separate from bad ones.

When you leave a sequence in the middle of work, do these things before you walk out:

  1. Lock the sequences that are at delivery state. Premiere has a sequence lock feature that prevents accidental edits. Use it on anything that's been approved.
  2. Save the project with a clear version name that ends with your initials and the date. Project_v05_HANDOFF_2026-04-15_LD.prproj.
  3. Drop a README in the project folder. A plain text file. What state is the cut in. What's pending. What's exported. Where the source files live. Anything weird about the workflow.
  4. Tell your producer or lead in writing. Slack is fine. Email is better. Cover what you handed off and what state it's in.

The next editor (which might be future you, in three months) will know what they walked into. Cost of doing this: 10 minutes. Cost of not doing it: a half-day of forensic work to figure out where the previous person left off.

A Note on Storage Bloat

Every shared drive at every post house is bloated. It's an industry-wide condition. Most of the bloat comes from imported source files that were considered for a project, never placed on a timeline, and forgotten. On a typical 50 TB shared NAS, 15 to 25 TB might be media that's not used in any active sequence.

You won't be the person who fixes this on day one. But it's worth knowing the pattern, because eventually someone will ask "why is the NAS full again?" and the answer is rarely "we shot too much on the last job." It's almost always "we never cleaned up the imported source from previous jobs."

Clip Sweeper is the kind of tool a senior assistant or a producer might use to audit which media is actually in use across all projects. The calculator helps shops figure out whether their current storage spend matches what they're actually using.

The Last Rule

Be the assistant editor who leaves the drive in better shape than you found it. Label your folders clearly. Version your project files honestly. Strip cache before you wrap. Ask before you delete.

Three months in, someone will say "you're the only one who keeps their projects clean." That's the whole job.