animation needed to be smoother

I spend hours making my animation smooth and I think I might be doing it the long wrong way. Let's say I have three pictures coming in and out. I take each picture and bring into the library. I create a movie clip and start with frame one to 30 and put the first picture there. I then create motion and have it start Dark to light on frame 1 to 5, then on frame 20 I fade to dark.

The next layer on top is the second picture and while the first is getting darker I use the alpha to bring this in . Then I fade it out after 29 frames etc..

You can see I use the timeline to do all this. My question, am I doing this all wrong? I notice others have really smooth transitions and wondering if they are using some other method. If so do you have detailed instructions.

Thanks

It depends more on the size of the movie clip your trying to fade. Any tween is very processor intensive. Even on a fairly fast processor, a 400x400 tween will be fairly jerky.

One way around it is to make the tweens faster, over less frames and cut down on the numbers of tweens going on at the same time, cause it all adds up. So if a 400x400 movie clip is bad, tweening one out and the other in at the same time is going to be twice as processor intensive. You can also up the frame rate to 30 or higher.