An HDTV frame has 4~6 times more pixels than a DTV frame. In order to encode the HDTV image in real time, parallel processing architectures have been widely used in many HDTV codec developments. That is, an HDTV Image is divided into several subbands and each subband is encoded in parallel using some DTV level encoders. In this paper, we adopt an HDTV codec architecture which divides an HDTV frame into 4 subbands and propose a new scene change detection algorithm using local variance. In addition, a new adaptive multichannel rate control scheme which allocate target bits adaptively to each subband of the HDTV image based on the activities of subband images is suggested in this paper. The activities of subband images are calculated at scene change detection part and reused at the adaptive rate control part. The simulation results show that the proposed scene change detection algorithm detects the scene change of HDTV video very accurately. Also the suggested adaptive multichannel rate control scheme shows better performance than the rate control method which allocates target bits equally to each subbands of the HDTV image.