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Panning refers to the horizontal movement or rotation of a film or video camera, or the scanning of a subject horizontally on video or a display device.

Movie and television cameras pan by turning horizontally on a vertical axis, but the effect may be enhanced by adding other techniques, such as rails to move the whole camera platform. Slow panning is also combined with zooming in or out on a single subject, leaving the subject in the same portion of the frame, to emphasize or de-emphasize the subject respectively.

In video technology, the use of a camera to scan a subject horizontally is called panning.

On the viewing screen of a display device, for example, a computer monitor, horizontal shifting of the entire displayed image. The panning direction is at a right angle with respect to the scrolling direction. Several 2-D computer games have been designed around this concept, but are referred to as platform scrollers or side-scrollers, even though the motion of the background is generally panning (usually from right to left), and the scrolling direction is thought of as vertical.

Example of a panning technique photo

In photography, the panning technique is used to suggest fast motion, and bring out foreground from background. In photographic pictures it is usually noted by a foreground subject in action appearing still (i.e. a runner frozen in mid-stride) while the background is streaked and/or skewed in the apparently opposite direction of the subject's travel.

The term panning is derived from panorama, a word originally coined in 1787 by Robert Barker for the 18th century version of these applications, a machine that unrolled or unfolded a long horizontal painting to give the impression the scene was passing by. (Barker also invented the cyclorama in which a large painting encircles an audience.)

• Tilt
• Pan and scan