A system and method for coding moving pictures according to MPEG-4/AVC is described which performs rapid quantization of the transformed residue signal is described. The system and method may employ a number of techniques, which may be considered separately or in combination, including: extreme macroblock (MB) analysis, pre-execution table generation, conditional skipping, and picture level scaling. For example, MBs are detected wherein the quantization scale is adapted prior to quantization processing. The quantization process can be skipped for DCT coefficients which do not meet a threshold criterion. Weighted quantization can be readily performed in response to generating sets of scaled quantization tables in the beginning of encoding each picture, wherein the quantization scale of the DCT coefficients need not be scaled in response to position.