A lot of folks use filters when they shoot to soften things up a bit. You can also play with color ranges and gamma settings to try and immitate something closer to film. My understanding is that there are a few opinions, favorite methods etc. so hopefully more will post what they do... whilest waiting, might see what you can find online - might search for stuff like HD & film where they're perhaps more concerned with this stuff, and you have more film veterans converting to digital.

In the VX2000 you have a custom preset menu. there you can turn sharpness down to the minimum to prevent the VX2000 to add sharpness electronically. for warmer colors, you could also change wbshift to the maximum. I prefer doing these things while recording rather than in post, as it saves you some processing time. Same also applies also to the to VX1000 and VX9000. I also prefer not to use 16:9 on these cameras, for 16:9, I personally frameserve using satish's frameserver to avisynth where I do all cropping, resizing and a temporal softening and the I do mpeg 2 compression using CCE Basic with quality settings (filtering) disabled in cce. I encode the same way for 4:3 except cropping and resizing. I personnally find that this will give me best results.

On occassion I have the pleasure of using a 1/2" pickup camera, you sure can tell the
difference from the handy 1/3" consumer cameras.

This website has some tips that really help on getting a desirable shallow DOF.
Sometimes it is best to use filters. I still am experimenting on my projects.
This might not be exactly something you were thinking of but combined with
the tips from others gives you a really enjoyable video.

http://www.dvcreators.net/media/depthoffield.html

I have found it almost universally a mistake to soften the ORIGINAL, that is while I am shooting. I may later WANT sharp images.

It is very easy to soften in your NLE, but completely impossible to sharpen something that is essentially blurry. Putting a "sharpen" filter on a blurry image is NOT the same as having a sharp original.

Besides, unless you have a remarkably good TV, it will be blurry anyway. The output of your VX-2000 is quite a bit sharper than the typical TV, so you may not need to blur or soften it. Look at it on the TV first, to make sure, before blurring it.

Isn't it funny, how much we spend on Mini-DV, an inherently sharp specification, and then we want to soften the image. Just think of how much we are going to spend on 1080i true HD camcorders in the future. Will we STILL want to soften them? Odd!