Tip #14, Distortion Lenses

Distortion lens can look extremely cool, but animating them can quickly make your SWFs heavy. Using a lower frame rate will cause LM to generate fewer bitmaps, and using a very low per-object export setting with a distortion lens can reduce file size without compromising visual quality (after all, each image will be visible for only a fraction of a second). You can also use hold keyframes on the distortion characteristics in conjunction with regular keyframes on opacity keyframes to fade between versions of the lens. LM will only need to generate bitmaps where the distortion characteristics change.

Distortion lenses work particularly well when exporting to animated GIF. For example, try running a quantize effect at 8 frames per second over a word in a typical banner; in my tests with the GIF color palette set to 8 colors, I still have several kilobytes left over for other content.