Avid Nitris is the new Avid editing system specifically designed to do online for HD. Flame and Inferno are dedicated after effects units. These are the top end of digital prodution resources.
The truth is that your best bet to create "as close to" images as the ones you've posted are to look at the following.
1) Forget post production fixes and concentrate on learning as much as you can about lighting and photography.
2) Forget the camera you own and look at raising budgets to hire in good quality professional cameras. So instead of shooting on HD, you could shoot on either digi-beta or DVCPro50, both of which in the hands of a good DOP will get you the results you want.
3) Only use your home computer for the rough cut, find the money to go to a professional post production house for your online edit, and hire a good colour corrector for a day or two. (we colour corrected our entire feature film in two days because we hired an incredible professional to do it and he was worth every penny we spent)
The bottom line is that it's not possible to get the quality of image that you want on mini-dv and editing on Premiere. You can do interesting stuff, but the slick glossy commercial look is expensive.
It all depends on what you're aiming for.
One tip I would give is that if you look at the image you'll notice that the girl is in focus the the background isn't. Something that is easy to achieve on film and difficult to achieve on video. The reason that you work on learning about lighting and photography is that it gives you the knowledge to understand how to manipulate the depth of field. Video cameras were designed to cope with low light levels, which means that in good light they have extra ordinary depth of field (everything is roughly in focus). To compensate for this the DOP will put load so ND(Netral Density) filters in the matt box on the front of the camera. ND cuts down the amount of light without changing the colour temperature. This effectively makes the depth of field smaller, allowing the video camera to handle more like film. On a professional camera (digi-beta, DVCPro50, HD) these things are easy to do, on the prosumer cameras it's more difficult, because most don't even encourage manual control of the exposure or the focus.
So, if you've got a camera that can take a matt box, and therefore filters, alone with your ND filters to decrase the depth of field, you stick in a black-pro-mist, which will give exactly that soft, commercial look you're after.
In post production, you increase the saturation of the colours to make them rich and heighten the glow, then colour correct in more yellow to make the images warmer. The only reason I know this is because I always do the opposite, decrease the saturation and increase the blue. These corredctions are all dependent on how close to a flat image you got in the first place. Most of the professioanl cameras are now programable with preset colour correction packages which create partiucular looks. The BBC camera teasm developed a lot of these and they really save time in production.
