An optical flow reference frame portion (e.g., a block or an entire frame) is generated that can be used for inter prediction of blocks of a current frame in a video sequence. A forward reference frame and a backward reference frame are used in an optical flow estimation that produces a respective motion field for pixels of a current frame. The motion fields are used to warp some or all pixels of the reference frames to the pixels of the current frame. The warped reference frame pixels are blended to form the optical flow reference frame portion. The inter prediction may be performed as part of encoding or decoding portions of the current frame.