In this paper, a modification of the 3-D SPIHT,(11) which is the 3-D extension to image sequence of 2-D SPIHT still image coding,(4) is presented in order to allow more flexibility in choosing the number of frames to be processed at one time by introducing unbalanced tree structure. Simulation shows that 3-D SPIHT with reduced coding latency still achieves coding results comparable to MPEG-2, and exhibits more uniform PSNR fluctuations. In addition, extension to color video coding is accomplished without explicit rate-allocation, and can be used to any color-plane representation.