In various examples, optical flow estimate (OFE) quality is improved when employing a hint-based algorithm in multi-level hierarchical motion estimation by using different scan orders at different resolution levels. A scan of an image performed with a scan order may initially leverage OFEs from a previous scan of the image, where the previous scan was performed using a different scan order. The OFEs leveraged from the previous scan are more likely to be of high accuracy until sufficient spatial hints are available to the hint-based algorithm for the scan to reduce the impact of potentially lower quality OFEs resulting from the different scan order of the previous scan.