Need efficient way to color transform parts of animation

I’m new to this forum, so if this question has already been asked, then I apologize. I can’t seem to find a situation quite like this which makes me believe I’m looking in the wrong places. I’m somewhat new to Flash so bear with me.

My situation: I have a looping animation that contains multiple keyframes, and each keyframe contains a movieclip symbol I want to apply a color transformation to through actionscript. When I apply the color transformation once to the symbol, it works the first time around. But when the animation loops and plays again, the color transformation is gone. If I apply the color transformation at every keyframe each time in code, I can only display a few instances of the animation before the FPS suffers. Is there an efficient way to apply a color transformation once and have it stick? :h:

Thanks!