Tip #7, Animating Color vs. Tint

If you're familiar with Flash, you might expect LM to vary the shade of objects in the same way that Flash does. But instead of varying tint (a native Flash transformation), LM varies the actual color of the object or layer. While this approach can yield more accurate results and allows you to apply color changes on just certain layers (Flash tint applies to a whole object), it requires LM to generate new artwork on every frame where color is changing. Therefore be judicious in animating color transformations, especially on artwork that will generate a bitmap on export to SWF. (For more info on what will become a bitmap on export, see http://www.adobe.com/support/techguides/livemotion/lmobjects/page4.html.)

You may be able to work around the file size penalty by making your shape a mask and animate the color of a rectangle beneath the mask. A new rectangle will be created on every frame, but it'll be about 35 bytes (almost definitely smaller than a new copy of your shape). One caveat: LM won't allow you to use vector artwork as a mask if you import it, but you can usually use the shape as a mask if you *paste* it instead. Converting the shape to a single color without a stroke before pasting may help.