Is it safe to use 72 FPS for Flash ActionScript animations?

Question

I'm working on some generative art animations using Flash ActionScript which appear much smoother at a frame rate of 72 FPS compared to 30 FPS or lower rates.
On a Intel Pentium E2200 Dual CPU @ 2.20 Ghz, Flash Player hardly uses more than 9% during the animations at 72 FPS. The animations are meant to run for a quite short period of time (less than 10 seconds each).
Is it safe to use this frame rate?

Answer 1

"Safe" is a strange word. It's unlikely to cause any physical harm or damage to machines, so I'd say it's safe.

Beyond that, without knowing what your target audience is, it's hard to say. I suspect your animations will run terribly on a Mac or Linux, or (depending on how they're built) on machines without discrete graphics.

That aside, you can very likely make them look just as smooth at ~30 FPS using ENTER_FRAME events + getTimer, or even ~10 FPS if you use Timer + bitmapData. There are a lot of well-known techniques for squeezing performance out of the Flash player that you can find with some searching.