An apparatus and method for performing bitplane coding with reordering, that may be used in a Fine Granularity Scalability (FGS) system. The apparatus and method reorder coefficients each time after a bitplane is coded. By reordering, the apparatus and method separate the coefficients into two groups. When coding a bitplane, bits in the first group are copied into the bitstream, while the bits in the second group are subject to common run-length, VLC, or arithmetic coding. The apparatus and method may also be used with or in a conventional SNR, temporal and/or spatially scalable architectures, for example, as utilized within an MPEG-4 framework.