Hello, I'm a translator and I'm sorry if it's off topic here but I don't know where should I place this question. It is about some "slang cameraman terms" concerning panning. When translating some movie featurette I came up to a short dialogue of two cameramen:

-We only have one or the other.
-Well, that’s why we pan.
-Yeah, but is this is a pan and you’re gonna do the pan, or you want to operate a pan?
-We’re going to operate a pan.


That's all. There was no more broad context about it, the only thing I can tell you is that it was about "The Mummy 1999" movie filming and it was supposedly (because that what's went next) about a moment when the couple of heroes was swinging on a swing put in a desert and then the girl goes off the swing.

I understood that they speak of two different ways of panning but unfortunately I don't know which is the difference between them. The only idea I got that it could be manual panning (when he says "do a pan") and automatic, using servos ("operate a pan"). I googled for both terms at this web-site and now I tend even more to this idea but it would be nice if somebody with more experience than mine could assure me in this or tell I'm wrong. How would you interpret this dialogue?

English is my first language and I'm afraid I don't understand the doing the pan/operating the pan discussion any more than you do.

Any one else?

Thank you for your answer although it didn't help me much. They say that absence of information is also information, so now I know those guys most probably were joking or just were high (due to extreme desert heat) :-)