I have a large vector drawing (imagine 5000x5000) that i want to break up into separate pieces. I know that I can convert this vector drawing into a bitmap and then use the copyPixels method to create many separate bitmaps of the different regions of the original vector drawing, but is there any way to subdivide it into movieclips that just contain vector graphics instead of a bitmap?
The reason im dividing a big chunk of vector graphics into smaller pieces is for performance reasons, so flash would only render a small part of this big chunk at a time (only certain regions/voxels/subdivisions are rendered at a time). But bitmaps apparently take up a lot of memory and the system im using would take much less memory if these subdivisions could be preserved in their original vector graphics form.
I imagine I could use masks somehow to achieve this effect (for each subdivision, duplicate the huge image and mask only the region that the subdivision represents), but I dont know the performance costs of masking or if this will create other problems.
So is there anyway to split up a movieclip of vector graphics into smaller movieclips of vector graphics the same way copyPixels can with bitmaps?