However It would be reasonable to include some kind of curve controler that is connected to the samples.
Why?
Well, you might have a camera position that requires few samples, lets say seeing a car on a ground from distance, but as we get closer the car needs more samples, to get a uniform noise you need to gradually up the sample cap. This could be done with a user Curve control over a timeline. That you could Key in and apply a bezier or the like to.
There is no reason to find the worse part of the scene, fix your samples to this and then render overkill on a larger proportion of the sequence that doesnt need that many samples.
- mads