Here’s one of those tips that you stumble upon, and feel embarrassed that you didn’t know this years ago.

Notice when scaling a bitmap or video up and down the image is subject to serious aliasing. Especially with a transparent background. Everything looks pixelated and choppy. Right?

Here’s the solution. In the properties of your image in the Flash library you will see the following setting.

Note that “Allow smoothing” is checked. This allows Flash to re-sample the image when it is scaled up or down, naturally there is some quality  loss but essentially it solves your problem. Used sparingly it may help with your bitmap manipulation.

What about video? No problem. The same principle applies, but you have to use ActionScript.

var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
nc.connect(null);
var ns:NetStream = new NetStream(nc);

myVideo.attachVideo(ns);
ns.setBufferTime(0);
ns.play(“mymovie.flv”);
myVideo.smoothing=true;

The last line is the killer!