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."

Comments

Rental prohibitive?

[31415926535897]

"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?"

If it's expensive (i.e. specialized), and you only have to use it once, then wouldn't rental be ideal? I would rather rent an expensive piece of equipment once, than roll my own and hope that it works (half as well as the real thing).

I guess it comes down to what your time is worth, but personally, I would want to rent in a situation like this.

Re:Rental prohibitive?

[nbert]

Yes, I agree that it wasn't a good choice to mention renting as a choice in the article.

But I completely agree that it often makes more sense to build some device out of old parts instead of buying expensive gear. Most of the time such things are expensive because:

*There is just a small market and/or
*it's too hard for Joe Sixpack to build it

It's nowadays possible to build just about anything with cheap components or even stuff which is considered trash. So if you have time and imagination at hand it's a good idea to think of building stuff on your own.
Especially if the money you saved is lower than the income you would have had if you spend the same time at work :)

Re:Rental prohibitive?

[fermion]

Sometimes it is a matter of opportunity costs. There may be limited funds, and if those funds are spent on project A, say a TelePrompter, then funds will not be available for project B, say buying dinner for clients after the presentation. Since dinner must be bought, the TelePrompter must be homemade. And while your time is worth something, the time spent in building the TelePrompter will be billed as an investment in acquiring clients and building the business.

This is really why windows was used so much in the 90's. The computer were relatively cheap. The software was easy to acquire for little cash. The stability compared to other platforms was irrelevant because software for other platforms was harder to get. Money spent on software was not seen an investment to build the business.

Re:Rental prohibitive?

[dubiousmike]

for a video professional, time is money. If he has the time to build a telepromter instead of just buying one that uses a PDA and comes with appropriate PDA software, he can't be that good at producing video.

They are so cheap, his time SHOULD be worth more than the hours to build one.

That said, he was industrious. Though he built one that is prohibitive to shooting on location. That thing is huge.

RTFA

[OverlordQ]

teleprompter was the solution, but there are no teleprompters in our area, and renting one from Los Angeles or San Francisco - both hundreds of miles away - was impractical and beyond my budget.

Renting is no good when you have to drive 200 miles round trip to rent+haul it.

WTF! That wasn't the point at all!

[macz]

I realize that with all the pressure to post first people don't always read the articles, but it is amazing to me that this and several preceding comments are making the same, misinformed statement... Why not tell him to memorize his lines... cause "That's better than a USB thumb drive!"

The point, and he did have one, was that using powerpoint, or perhaps it's analog equivalent, cue cards, were not good enough for him. He was always looking off to the side or down and not right at the camera.

I will 'splain: Unless you can afford a studio with long camera angles, there is a thing called parallax that will make you look like every dumb asshole who tries, and fails to do a home documentary... staring off into space, uncomfortably over the viewer's right shoulder or worse, their crotch.

We have all seen these on public access channels that have small studios or too few lenses to get sufficiently far enough away that a person holding a cue card can make the person on camera look natural without completely obstructing the view of the camera.

I could understand it if someone said "What about a piece of poster board with a hole cut in the middle and the text written around the lens" because that would at least show some understanding of the problem, if not actually hitting on an acceptable solution. (Hint: Unless you have only a single cue card, bad idea.)

Think about it, WHY ARE TELEPROMPTERS SO EXPENSIVE AND USEFUL IN THE FIRST PLACE? It is because, Occam's razor hasn't eliminated them in the places where they are most useful. Yes, Letterman and Conan can get away with cue cards, but that is because they have larger studios, more cameras to cut up the view so that people don't get uncomfortable with a walleyed announcer, and they can move around during spots that depend heavily on cue cards like the short monologue of 5-8, 30 second jokes. Not 60 second news storys where they have to pronounce words like Slobodan Milosevich or Hafith al-Barghuth

Give the guy a little credit, he said he tried other, less complicated analog and digital methods and in true /. fashion, copied the IP of the Teleprompter and released it open source. Compare his solution, some 2x4's and a piece of glass with a commercial equivalent

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

[WarPresident]

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?

How would this be any more difficult than mounting a sheet of plate glass at a 45 degree angle? You would have a mirror mounted below and parallel to the plate glass. The laptop would then be oriented upright and pushed back on the platform closer to the camera. It's really quite simple. See ascii below for obfuscation.

Observer \ glass Camera
..mirror \ _| laptop