Compression Question

I had a quick question for people who import avi’s or any other video media into flash. What is the best way to compress a video so that the flash will be smaller size and load quicker? Here is a link to what I am trying to create.

http://site211.mysite4now.com/sting22/

The top menu is the main issue, as it takes forever to load because of the spinning logo. The original avi is about 1 MB big, I had thought of using a pre-loader, but I would really like to find a way to make the file smaller either way.