1. A method of encoding in a video compression system, the method comprising the steps of: converting a source video frame into a quantized source space-frequency representation including a set of frequency vectors, each vector including a set of coefficients; estimating defined conditional statistics of each frequency vector of a subset of said set of frequency vectors; estimating, for a subset of coefficients from each of said subset of frequency vectors, an encoding rate based on said defined conditional statistics; and applying a Slepian-Wolf code to said each subset of coefficients to encode said each subset of coefficients at the encoding rate estimated for said each subset of coefficients; and wherein the step of estimating the defined conditional statistics includes the step of for each of the frequency vectors of the subset of the set of frequency vectors, identifying another frequency vector having a defined relationship to said each frequency vector, and estimating a conditional probability distribution of the said each vector, conditioned on said other frequency vector.