The paper proposes a new framework for the control of the distortion variation in video coding schemes based on motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF). The distortion in an arbitrary decoded frame at any temporal level in the MCTF pyramid is expressed as a function of the distortions in the reference frames at the same temporal level. The approach is formulated for the bi-directional unconstrained MCTF (UMCTF) scheme of Turaga et al., (2002), which does not include the update-lifting step. The proposed framework can be extended to the generalized form of MCTF by utilizing additional control parameters. Experimental results demonstrate the control of the distortion variation in video coding systems based on spatial-domain and wavelet-domain MCTF. One concludes that the proposed framework provides the means of controlling the tradeoff between the average distortion and the distortion variation in each group-of-pictures (GOPs) within the decoded sequence.