Below is a simplified version of my problem.

Imagine a span of 42 frame. On frame 1, I have a button that plays the
timeline and a stop command. If the user clicks Play, the timeline advances.
On frame 2 there is an embedded Quicktime movie that spans 40 frames, and some
code that does some calculations. On frame 42, there is a stop command.

When I initially built this, the code that executed on frame 2 was pretty lean
and the play-head rolled through frames 2-42 without pause. However, the code
on frame 2 has since been bulked up, and now causes the play-head to hang for
about 9 seconds before playing through the timeline.

The code is obviously eating up system resources, but is there any way to
let/force the embedded movie to play while the calculations are taking place?
I am ok with the total duration being 9 seconds, but I?d like the Quicktime to
continue playing while the evaluations occur.

Thanks for any help

your code will execute from beginning to end before anything is updated
on-stage. your only option is to accept the current situation or to break your
code into blocks of code that execute sequentially allowing the stage to update
between code blocks.