Never mind. I'm doing briefing movies in-between the missions. I've already finished my first one.
I've attached the original GIF file I made (which is a hellovalot smaller than the AVI), so you can see what it'll turn into. Now all I need is to convert it to VQA, and hope the filesize turns out smaller than the (probably uncompressed) AVI.
Might be able to compress the whole thing with Pinnacle Studio. See if it will turn out smaller. It's 1 GB now and lasts only 48 seconds!