In recent years, rate control plays an increasing important role in real-time video communication applications using MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. An important step in many existing rate control algorithms, which employs the quadratic rate-distortion (R-D) model, is to determine the target bits for each P frame. This paper aims in improving video distortion, due to high motions or scene changes, by more accurately predicting frame complexity using the statistics of previously encoded frames. We use mean absolute difference (MAD) ratio as a measure for global frame encoding complexity. Bit budget is allocated to frames according to their MAD ratio, combined with the bits computed based on their buffer status. Simulation results show that the H.264 coder, using our proposed algorithm with virtually little computational complexity added, effectively alleviates PSNR surges and sharp drops for frames caused by high motions or scene changes.