BitmapData Effects — Blur/Fade

This is a technique I use a lot in animations, and especially in the sound visualizers that can be found on this site. I had a couple of people asking me how to do this, so I decided to make a post about it. Check it out.

My approach is pretty simple, I use a drawing sprite to draw whatever it is I want to show, and then afterwards use a BitmapData.draw method to get that sprite's information. Then I usually apply two filters to that BitmapData, a ColorMatrixFilter and a BlurFilter. I do this at most once per frame, depending on frame rate or how much I'm already doing per frame.

Source Code