The
system disclosed herein seeks to solve the problem of unnatural, dizzy camera motion when moving a camera between two preset positions, e.g., head and shoulder shots of two videoconference participants. Particularly, the
system described herein attempts to mimic the camera movement that a professional camera operator would use in a professional
video production. A preferred method of moving the camera between two positions is to first
zoom out, away from the first position, pan across to the next position, then
zoom in. This gives viewers of the camera content an idea of the
spatial relationship between the two camera positions and also avoids the aesthetically undesirable effect of panning through irrelevant visual background at high
zoom ratios. Disclosed herein is a technique of producing this desired behavior in the context of an automatically or semi-automatically controlled
video camera, such as those used in conjunction with
videoconferencing equipment.