This paper presents a modified MSEA (multi-level successive elimination algorithm) which gives less computational complexity. We predict a motion estimation error using the norms at the already processed levels in the MSEA scheme and then decide on if the following levels should be proceeded using the predicted result. We skip the computation at the following levels where the processing is no longer meaningful. At this point, skipping the processing gives computational gain compared to the conventional MSEA scheme. For the purpose of predicting the norm at each level, we first show the theoretical analysis of the norm at each level and then verify the analysis by experiments. Based on the analysis, a new motion estimation method is proposed and its performance is evaluated.