H.264/AVC provides various useful features such as improved coding efficiency and error robustness. These features enable mobile devices to adopt H.264 standard to achieve effective video communications. However, the encoder complexity is greatly increased mainly due to motion estimation (ME) and mode decision. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to jointly optimize intermode selection and ME using the multiresolution analysis. Experimental results show that the proposed method is over 3 times faster than other existing methods while maintaining the coding efficiency.