Smooth Animation Strategies

I build a lot of very small scale flash websites and I often use simple animation effects such as fading images in/out, sliding consoles in/out, etc. Up to this point I’ve just used the Tweener class provided in the caurina package.

However, I find that my effects (as simple as they are) are very choppy, and often lag. I’m wondering if there are strategies out there for getting better looking animation. I tried to see if there were any multithreading options so that I could allocate a thread to just animation but apparently there isn’t…so I’m not sure what else I can do to make the playback smoother.

I go to many sites and see flash transitions that playback at optimal speed and I have no idea how that is so commonly achieved. Are there good practices out there for optimal animation playback? Or some utility that is commonly used? I read that PixelBender effects run on their own thread, but I don’t think PixelBender can do everything I need to do, and I doubt that the majority of Flash sites out there use PixelBender.