This paper presents an efficient algorithm for motion estimation to reduce High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard encoding complexity. Phase correlation is initially utilized as a preprocessing step to indicate an approximation of the shift between coding units in the current frame and the reference frame. This is followed by a 9-point diamond search centered on the shift found in the initial step, in order to refine the best matching block. The proposed method has the potential to yield substantial improvements in terms of execution time and resulting video quality in comparison to the traditional search methods.