A system and method synthesizes multiview videos. Multiview videos are acquired of a scene with corresponding cameras arranged at a poses such that there is view overlap between any pair of cameras. A synthesized multiview video is generated from the acquired multiview videos for a virtual camera. A reference picture list is maintained for each current frame of each of the multiview videos and the synthesized video. The reference picture list indexes temporal reference pictures and spatial reference pictures of the acquired multiview videos and the synthesized reference pictures of the synthesized multiview video. Then, each current frame of the multiview videos is predicted according to reference pictures indexed by the associated reference picture list during encoding and decoding.