1. A video camera system, comprising: a wide-angle camera system configured to generate a digital video image using a lens providing an approximate hemispherical field of view and an image sensor, the digital video image distorted by the lens; an image processing circuit that receives said distorted digital image, and corrects optical distortion in portions of said distorted digital image correlating to at least one automatically generated virtual camera simultaneously detecting and tracking objects within said digital video image, while continuing to track previously detected objects, a control circuit that transmits commands to the image processing circuit, the image processing circuit executing said commands by correcting optical distortion to emulate pan, tilt, or zoom commands in corresponding ones of at least one specified virtual camera without interrupting said detecting and tracking; a command received at the camera in a data packet used on a network; a digital image transmitted from the camera in a data packet used on the network; and the data packets are addressed using a network address, wherein said automatically generated virtual camera and said specified virtual camera correspond to portions within and smaller than said digital video image, and wherein said image processing circuit and/or said control circuit sends at least one of said automatically generated virtual cameras and at least one of said specified virtual cameras to an output.