Systems and methods are provided for transcoding media content in accordance with thematic and/or cinematic characteristics of scenes. In particular, compression techniques may be selected to optimize compression of scenes based on their thematic and/cinematic characteristics. Scene boundary identifiers, such as scene in and out points may be identified, and the corresponding thematic and/or cinematic characteristic meta-data can be sent to a transcoder for transcoding. In this way, the specific characteristics of each scene in a movie can be accounted for during transcoding. This can result in transcoded versions of the movie that have better audio/visual qualities, and that can be encoded at a lower overall bit rate.