In H.264 standard, an intra frame is the first frame of a GOP (Group of Pictures) and all macroblocks of an intra frame are encoded using the same quantization parameter. In addition, an intra frame is used for encoding the following frames of the same GOP so the encoding results of an intra frame affect the encoding results of the entire GOP. Thus, it is important to find the optimal quantization parameter of an intra frame for improving the quality of a GOP. In this paper, we propose an searching method for an optimal quantization parameter of an intra frame in real time. The proposed method uses a gradient descent method to find the optimal value based on characteristics of the optimal quantization parameters. Experimental results show that the proposed method captures the characteristics of the optimal quantization parameter and accurately estimates the optimal value.