Build Your Own Teleprompter

bigt_littleodd writes "Ever been in the situation where a certain expensive piece of equipment would be ideal to do the job at hand, but you would probably never ever need it to use it again, thus making the purchase/rental of equipment prohibitive? Here's a guy that had such a need and built a teleprompter with easy-to-find materials, a camcorder and a laptop."

What?

[Guillermito]

would be ideal to do the job at hand, but you would probably never ever need it to use it again, thus making the purchase/

RENTAL of equipment prohibitive?

I would rather say this is exactly the kind of situation in which renting the equipment makes sense.

Re:Where do you get these stories anyway?

[ttldkns]

when you RTFA you see that he tried to put a laptop just under the camera but it still looked stupid once it was on tape as he was looking down. With a teleprompter there is a sheet of glass placed infront of the camera at an angle, the camera sees through this just fine. There is then a source of light placed underneath and because of total internal reflection the light (or screen of text) gets reflected into your eyes. you can then read the word and look into the camera at the same time.

Coral Cache

[OverlordQ]

Coral Cache [nyud.net], Site going down quick.

Re:Where do you get these stories anyway?

[omega_cubed]

The part that actually requires construction is the part where he projects the text on a slab of glass that is placed between him and the video recorder.

The whole point of the teleprompter, rather than a fancy-schmancy projected PowerPoint display, is that the person reading the teleprompter stares directly into the video camera: from his point of view the text is directly in front of the camera. The slab of glass at 45 degree angle means that the text on the prompter will not be reflected into the camera.

Of course, the reflection means that the texts all apper mirrored, compared to the laptop screen. Personally, I don't understand why he needed to export the document in postscript and mirror flip it. Wouldn't it be alright if he just add another mirror?

X + xrandr can mirror text

[po8]

The image on my home-built teleprompter was -- of course -- backward. I tried to find a way to reverse the entire screen, but that was fruitless.

Note that with a modern version of the X server supporting Keith Packard's "Resize and Rotate" extension and utility, this could be easy. Just say "xrandr -x" to mirror the display left-to-right. (Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to work for all servers supporting the extension yet.)

Re:Where do you get these stories anyway?

[dirty]

Wow, what an insightful comment! Everyone starts out somewhere bucko. What if your show is only ok? By your logic cheap high quality digital camcorders should have no reason to exist. After all, if your show is excellent you can afford a proper film camera.

Sheesh, some people just can't appreciate creativity.

Well, if the goal is to make things difficult...

[papaskunk]

There are no mirrors. Adding a mirror to the construction would be a lot of physical work, not to mention: where would you put the mirror? InDesign is AppleScriptible (which, when combined with watched folders, allows the process to be completely automated), but in any case checking one box when you're saving the file, which takes all of about half a second, seems like a lot less work than adding mirrors to a wooden frame to me.

Commodore 64

[tekrat]

Most of the small studios I have worked in used the venerable Commodore 64 as a teleprompter (to this day, many are still in use).

Using teleprompter software that was developed for the system, the C=64 had the advantage to being able to output to any NTSC screen, making it a cheap and reliable method of putting text on the screen.

You simply typed in your script, and ran the software, which would display the text one line at a time and you could go fowards, backwards, etc. The monitor was then bounced into the glass in front of the camera, so the person speaking could look directly into the camera and see the text reflected.

Pretty simple and very very reliable.

This guy's my professor...

[papaskunk]

I know this is off-topic, but you'll thank me...

This guy is one of my professors. This teleprompter is for a presentation on panoramic photos, of which he is an amazing photographer. He's actually creating a coffee-table book from these panoramics [thelawlers.com], and some are for sale through PayPal.

Worth at least a look, especially the ones of the Brooklyn Bridge. He'll also sell you huge prints if you email him.