In this contribution, two encoder improvements are proposed to enhance the motion estimation (ME) efficiency of the VTM-5.0 encoder, including 1) adding the motion vector (MV) candidates from previously inter coding units (CUs) for the starting point selection of integer-pel ME; 2) local refinement of the control-point motion vectors (CPMVs) for affine ME. Compared to the VTM-5.0 anchors, the proposed encoder improvements reportedly provides average {Y, U, V} BD-rate savings of {0.31%, 0.52%, 0.53%} and {0.16%, 0.16%, 0.10%} for RA and LD configurations, respectively, with 1% encoding time increase.