A wavelet transform coding method that fulfills the requirements of HD-VCR(high definition video casstte recorder) for studio applications in proposed. A constant bit rate is achieved by a forward rate control technique whcih determins the quantizer stepsize based on the coding results fo the previous frame. We also propose a two-level coder that consists of both the IDC(independently decodable code) and the DDC(dependently decodable code). To minimize error propagation, the transformed coefficients are restructured into transform blocks which are represented by a tree structure. The result shows thta the proposed coding scheme produces better picture quality with block effects than that of DCT(discrete cosine transform) based coding schemes at the same compression ratio. The proposed method meets most of the requirements of HD-VCR.