ActionScript 3.0 :: Changing The Rendering Order?

Imagine I had the movieclip structure below... root - mc1 mc2 - mc3 mc4 - mc5 - ... - mc6 mc 7Where my root has two children (mc1 and mc2), mc2 has two children (mc3 and mc4), etc... So taking mc6, it is a movieclip an arbitrary number of levels down the movieclip hierarchy.

I want mc6 to render as though it were a child of mc1, ie. before mc2 and its children. However, if I simply use addChild(), I would remove mc6 from it's current position in the hierachy, thus changing the transformations which determine it's position on the screen. I simply want to change the point in the order at which it is rendered to the screen (render it before all other clips), but NOT change where it is in the spatial hierarchy (in order to preserve animations etc).

My current way of doing this, is to set mc6 to visible=false. Then I add a bitmap to mc1. Then each frame, I wipe the bitmap and render mc6 to the bitmap using its localToGlobal transformation. However, this is a very wasteful solution since the bitmap needs to be the size of the screen which results in the entire screen being redrawn every single frame. I'd like to retain flash's built in optimizations for only redrawing changed movieclips.

Another way would be to duplicate the mc6 movieclip, and attach the duplicate to mc1 as a child whilst making the original clip invisible again. However, then I would have to update the new movieclip with every single possible change which could occur to the original mc6 - this would get complicated pretty quickly.