In analyzing a coded result to thereby calculate data distribution
corresponding to a characteristic of an input image signal, rather than
determining data distribution for all of the pictures, an aggregate of
such pictures that have roughly the same coding difficulty is captured as
one scene. This scene is prescribed as a video edit unit (VEU), so that,
in configuration, the input image signal is subdivided into a plurality
of video edit units (VEUs) to thereby set an average target coding rate
for each of these video edit units (VEUs), which are entered as coding
conditions to thereby determine data distribution for each of the
pictures at the time of re-coding.