Creating crisp/quality videos

[Jjaeger240]

To give you a quick run down....for the past several years I've been doing media coverage of high school, youth, and road running races which largely includes filming the races and uploading them to our website. We are now re-introducing the website as we are going through a major transformation process in our business, and it has convinced me that I would like to step up our video production and quality.

Currently I shoot using a Cannon GL2 camcorder. It's a great camera, has sound stability control, etc. However, I have never used the camera for anything beyond simple turn on, point and shoot, and upload.

To give you an idea, the videos I currently turn out end up looking something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uJAKJPpjJA

What I would like is for the image quality to be more compareable to something like this: http://vimeo.com/4528309 or this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ9US-a8Hzw

I've been messing with settings on the camera all day and have determined how to adjust a lot of features, but all the adjustments in the world have left me to no avail in getting a better quality end result.

How do I get the grains out of the video and get a solid color?
How can I get a crisp image with solid edges?
How can I get the general color and lighting to look that good?

I also just started using Adobe Premiere Pro today in case you're curious what video editing software I'm using.

If anyone has any recommendations on what I can alter on my camcorder or settings to adjust in Premiere Pro to get the quality result in those two videos I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

[Captain Satellite]

Your quality isn't bad and probably won't improve much beyond that. It's your subject matter, lighting, composition, motion and most of all the distance of your subject(s).

Much more experienced users will chime in but that's what I see.

These guys helped my videos go from total crap to...

this.

[Jjaeger240]

I'm also putting into consideration that today I was trying to film similar subjects as shown in those videos at various distances, lighting, etc. and I still can't get rid of the graininess at all. My biggest issue is that I continually get a grainy image instead of solid colors, I cannot get clean lines or edges, and that my shot always looks too bright and washed out instead of containing a darker hue to better go with overcast (or at least something to give the video itself a cleaner feel).