In this paper, we propose a new and fast method for assigning the number of key frames to each shot. At first we segment the entire video sequence into elementary content unit called shots and then the key frame allocation is performed by calculating the accumulated value of AF(activity function). The proposed algorithm is based on the amount of content variation using DC images extracted from compressed video. By assigning the number of key frames to the shot that has the largest value of content function, one key frame is assigned at a time until you run out of given all key frames. The main advantage of our proposed method is that we do not need to use time-exhaustive computations in allocating the key frames over the shot and can perform it fully automatically.