The emerging Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extends the H.264/AVC video coding standard with new tools designed to efficiently support temporal, spatial and SNR scalability. In real-time multimedia systems, the coding performance of video encoders and decoders is limited by computational complexity. This thesis presents techniques to manage computational complexity of H.264/AVC and SVC video encoders. These techniques aim to provide significant complexity saving as well as a framework for efficient use of SVC.