In another thread someone mentioned that during video shooting with the TZ3, the focus is fixed at where it started when you began shooting, i.e. the camera doesn't continiously autofocus while shooting video. And indeed when I checked the manual that someone posted a while back, it confirms this.

I must be missing something because this seems like it would make the video mode useless for anything except stationary objects that are mostly equally distant from the camera. You couldn't pan across a baseball field for example and have anything in focus except whatever the camera focused on initially. Or pan across a room full of people. It would seem that many/most video situations would include panning the camera across many different objects that are different distances from the camera.

There must be something wrong in my logic here or I think I would have seen posts complaining that the TZ3 video mode is of little use, when in fact the only complaint I have seen is regarding the lack of zooming during video shooting. The only explanation that comes to mind is that maybe the camera focuses with a large enough depth of field (or is it "depth of focus") so that objects of various distances are always in focus?

Is this lack of continious focusing during video shooting really as big a problem as I am thinking it is?