Faster way of scaling/rotating/alpha of movieclips?

Hi all,

I have been working on a Public Display for a project, and am running into problems in terms of the speed of the animation involved. It appears that when scaling/rotating/changing alpha of the movieclips, the process grinds badly.

Basically I have a heap of little notice objects (which are subclassed off movieclip), all of which animate to their new position when a button is clicked. The grind happens when they all animate involving rescaling/rotating/alpha (which I think is because it cant cache as a bitmap while doing this).

I am just setting the x,y,rotate,width,alpha and height values of the movieclips on a timer. Is there a way in Flash to speed this up? Or a more optimized way of doing this?

cheers

ps. here is a screenshot for reference