[AS 3] Flash Efficiency: Vectors turned into Bitmaps

In the past, there have been occasions to convert some objects to bitmaps and then placed in the flash movie to allow the movie to play smoother. The reason is that bitmaps will save on the CPU cycles during processing versus rendering vector-based objects. This is because of the math that is required to compute vectors on each frame is very intensive when compared to a rasterized object. So, when possible, if the background does not change it will be more efficient if the vector objects are converted to a bitmap. Flash Actionscript 3.0 allows this to done easily by just adding:

myVectorObject.cachedAsBitmap = true;

This object will remain as a bitmap and cached until the flash player requests for it’s property to change, like it’s scale.