A system and method provides transcoding a video in parallel by multiple transcoders based on a measure of video coding complexity (VCC). The system has a video pre-processing module, a master transcoder, a transcoding controller and multiple transcoders. The video pre-processing module transcodes a source video into an intermediate video. The master transcoder partitions the intermediate video into multiple transcoding units, where a transcoding unit identifies a portion of data of the intermediate video for transcoding. The master transcoder further generates a transcoding request for each transcoding unit. The transcoding controller distributes the transcoding units to the multiple transcoders, which transcode the data of the transcoding units in parallel into transcoded data.