Disclosed are techniques for adaptive interpolation filtering of luminance and chrominance samples in the context of motion compensation in video encoding or decoding. A two-dimensional interpolation filter of n×m coefficients may be separable, i.e., it may be separated into two one-dimensional filters with m and n coefficients, respectively. The bitstream may include, per video unit and sub-sample position, information indicating whether to use a newly-generated, a cached, or a default filter that may be a separable two-dimensional filter. The information may be structured in a way that takes advantage of the two-dimensional filter being separable. When a newly-generated filter is signalled, the bitstream may contain information pertaining to the characteristics of the newly-generated filter, such as its coefficients. A decoder may fetch this information from the bitstream to create the filters which are applied to samples of the video unit. An encoder may create a bitstream as described.