Most editors ignore indices until something breaks. But understanding what they are can save you hours of frustration. In simple terms, an index is a temporary cache file (usually with a .cfa or .pek extension) that Premiere Pro creates to read your media faster.

Have a Premiere Pro indexing horror story? Drop it in the comments.

If you’ve ever been deep into a Premiere Pro project and suddenly experienced choppy playback, frozen frames, or the dreaded "audio buzzing but video lagging" scenario, you’ve likely encountered a corrupted or missing index file .