Premiere Pro CS4 indexing and conforming issue

Question

Hello guys,
Is it normal for Premiere Pro CS4 to always conform and index the clips?
The clips have been conformed and indexed already but the program always do these procedures from time to time?
Is there a setting or preference that I can disable this function or is it something default to the program?>

Answer 1

Robert,
This is quirk of Dynamic Link between AE and PPro. For some reason, even if your AE comp has no audio, DL suggests a phantom audio track to PPro when that comp is DL'd and every time thereafter when you change the comp in AE. This results in reconforming the same audio track (real or implied) multiple times--a side effect of the "liveness" that is Dynamic Link. The clip automagically appears updated, and so PPro assumes that something has changed, and therefore will abandon the old conformed audio file and create a new one. The result is a pile of CFA and PEK files, most of which are extinct.
At this time, there is no way around this that I've uncovered. I believe it will take a future update of Dynamic Link to make it "smarter", in that it either checks if the audio portion of a comp has changed before reconforming, or it doesn't suggest an audio track if none exists in the comp. I don't know about most people, but I don't do a lot of audio in AE, so this feature would be helpful, I think.
The best approach is to set the PPro preference to create media cache files next to the original (Edit > Preferences > Media > Save Media Cache files next to originals when possible) to On. This way, every so often or at the end of a work day, you can jump into the folder where your AE comp is stored and quickly select and delete all of the CFA and PEK files. Even if you delete the one currently being used by PPro, it will be recreated when you reenter the project.