About Operation Order; Drawing With Actionscript - MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-LEARNING ACTIONSCRIPT 2.0 IN FLASH Manual

About operation order

The following list is the order of operations in which a filters array, blend modes, color
transforms, and mask layers are attached or performed for a movie clip instance:
1. The movie clip's bitmap is updated from vector content (the
set to ).
true
2. If you use the
setMask()
alpha blend between the two images.
3. Filters are then applied (blur, drop shadow, glow, and so on.)
4. If you use the ColorTransform class, the color transform operation is performed and
cached as bitmap result.
5. If you apply a blending mode, the blend is then performed (using a vector renderer).
6. If you apply external masking layers, the layers perform masking (using a vector renderer).

Drawing with ActionScript

You can use methods of the MovieClip class to draw lines and fills on the Stage. This lets you
create drawing tools for users and draw shapes in the SWF file in response to events. The
following are the MovieClip class drawing methods:
beginFill()
beginGradientFill()
clear()
curveTo()
endFill()
lineTo()
lineStyle()
moveTo()
You can use the drawing methods with any movie clip. However, if you use the drawing
methods with a movie clip that was created in authoring mode, the drawing methods execute
before the clip is drawn. In other words, content that is created in authoring mode is drawn
on top of content drawn with the drawing methods.
You can use movie clips with drawing methods as masks; however, as with all movie clip
masks, strokes are ignored.
540 Animation, Filters, and Drawings
method, and the mask has a bitmap cache, Flash performs an
property is
cacheAsBitmap