I'm making a game which will have scrolling up, down, left and right, kind of like in Zelda games. However, the maps will be rather detailed, so I can't really do tile based scrolling. I'm try to find a way to make the scrolling non tile based, but not cpu intensive at the same time.
I've found 2 ways so far, but both are pretty laggy. One way is to make the stage huge and draw the whole map on the stage, then have the char move around and have a virtual camera following the character. The other way is to have the map as a movieclip and make that move instead of the char, or have boundary boxes that shift the map.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I also have a questions about general lag:
Does only the frame that movieclips are on affect how much lag it has, or the whole size of the movieclip? What I mean is, say I had several cannons on a map that rotate and fire at your character. If I had all of the cannon animations on frame two and just a blank frame one, then coded the mc so that it switches to frame two when you move next to it, but stays on frame one when you are far away, if that will reduce lag.