ActionScript 3.0 :: Player Color In Flash Games For Sprite Animation

We're trying to find the most optimal memory solution to doing Player Color in a flash game for sprite animation. We're using CS3 Action Script 3.0. Basically we're using sprite animation but currently for every player we create a duplicate set of animations with just different color. This is very expensive. Vector graphics tend to slow down performance too much for our games so we need to use bitmaps and would like to stick to that. So for a bitmap the alpha channel really only needs 2 values 0 for transparent 1 for draw the pixel. Is there any way I can use the other 254 values for a player color algorithm. The best we've come up with is to do 1 set of animations & 1 set of color mask animtions. So in total we would have 2 full set of animations for 2-x players. The Color mask seems to need to be 32 bits. So what I have is 2 questions.

1) Is there a way we can make 1 set of bitmap animations but use the 254 other values in the alpha channed to do player color?2) Is ther a way to use a Mask set of animations but only use 8 bit not 32 bit?