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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."
"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.
Was I the only one who read that as "build your own teleporter?"
Too much Si Fi....
I know it's quite uncool to read the article and all. . .
But even with sophisticated presentation software, there's still a basic problem: when you're reading a screen, you're not looking directly at the camera. And that's bad. Which is why this guy's teleprompter is directly in front of the camera, and he can maintain proper eye contact throughout.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
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.
How many computers are too many?
Coral Cache, Site going down quick.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I keep squinting and saying "Huh, is that a photo? Or a rendered graphic? No ... it's a photo! But hmmm ... it looks like a cool rendering."
I'd be curious about how the photos were taken.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Bit by Bit: Forget Cue Cards, Make a Teleprompter!
Creative problem solving is a trait many creative professionals share, but perhaps no one possesses that skill more than Brian P. Lawler. See how he made a teleprompter with a laptop, Adobe InDesign, and some scrap wood. Ingenious.
(creativepro.com)
By Brian P. Lawler, creativepro.com contributing editor
Thursday, December 16, 2004
It was Thursday evening and I needed a teleprompter.
I was making a video about panoramic photography, and for the scenes where I speak directly into the camera I looked like a cross-eyed newscaster. While trying to read cue cards on a stand in front of the camera, my eyes were cast downward, and that looked odd.
To overcome this problem, I decided to read from the screen of my PowerBook instead. I figured that I could put the PowerBook display closer to the lens, and thus not appear to be looking down when looking at the camera.
But even with the text on the PowerBook screen, I still looked slightly downward when I wanted to look directly into the lens of the camera. A 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. I decided to build one.
Discipline Makes Successful Video
I am careful when making video productions to enforce a moviemaker's discipline upon myself and my hired crew and helpers. This is a skill learned from experience. When one is making a video, attention to detail, continuity, and story are critical. I find that I can't go back -- ever -- to shoot a fill-in scene; something will have changed, someone won't be available, the light will be different -- something will prevent success. Instead, I work to get it right the first time!
In the back of my sketchbook I keep a cardboard template with four windows cut to the proportion of a television screen. I use this to draw frames for my storyboards, and then I sketch ideas and stories into the frames. My sketchbook thus becomes the foundation of many of my projects. I had been working on the storyboard for this video for several months, and the story and scene ideas covered many pages of the book (see Figure 1).
From Sketchbook to Database
After deciding to use a teleprompter, I wanted to convert the sketches in my book to visual elements of a script database. I scanned the pages of the sketchbook, and then cropped the individual frame drawings into small photos that I stored in a folder. I then built a FileMaker template, and imported all the images into that database. FileMaker is very accommodating in this respect -- it imported my entire folder of numbered images into the database automatically.
Once the sketches were imported, I added descriptions, scene and shot numbers (used to sort the story into chapters), and the narration text. This method allowed me to develop the text that I would read into the camera using the teleprompter. Using FileMaker's sorting functions, I then generated a story that was in logical order with a narration that flows smoothly and which I could read easily. After sorting the script, I exported the script records into text, and then placed the resulting file in Adobe InDesign for my teleprompter needs.
Construction of the teleprompter
Having seen a number of commercial teleprompters over the years in television studios and at trade shows, I understood the concept. A teleprompter is a made of a sheet of glass suspended in front of the camera lens at a 45-degree angle. The glass reflects the image of a TV screen without affecting the light entering the lens. In the most sophisticated units, there is a controller -- and an operator -- to set the pace of the text scrolling on the screen. Mine is more primitive.
My prompter is nothing more than a sheet of window glass supported in a plywood frame in front of the camera at the correct angle (see Figure 3). I probably spent three hours cutting and building. Once
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?
Engineers also speak PDE, only in a different dialect.
Maybe the little rectangular object that protruded from President Bush's backside during the debates was really a wireless teleprompter that transmitted wirelessly to an implant in the visual cortex of his brain. Better to rent than buy, though, unless it is upgradable.
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.)
I read this as "build your own teleporter".. been looking at the screen for too long !!
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.
-matt
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
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
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.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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, 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.
No, Bush didn't rent that, he bought it, and it was a good investment seeing as how often he probably uses it.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
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?
..mirror \ _| laptop
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
Here come da fudge!
Before anyone makes fun of this guy for not just using PowerPoint or something else, just think about what a teleprompter is being used for. Someone is reading a script that they've either not had in their possession long enough to read it or contains content that's new enough to NOT allow for memorization (i.e. breaking news).
A friend of mine shot a documentary last December whose narrator was none other than Ben Jones, former US congressman and, more famously, Cooter, the mechanic from The Dukes of Hazzard. Mr. Jones had only had the script for a few days, and he wanted to make minor changes as he went along to facilitate his own personal style.
I was asked to be a production assistant. I ended up, for the most part, being responsible for a low-end teleprompter we were using for the documentary script. In order to keep up or slow down depending on Mr. Jones' reading speed, a thumbwheel type control was used off camera to move the script up and down at variable speeds. Mr. Jones finally asked me to do it since, after trying it once, he found that I kept up with his rate of speech much better than the other production assistant.
Sure enough, documentary narration that was requiring retakes and retakes suddenly wrapped up a helluva lot more quickly. We would end up taking so much time in earlier takes because the precision required for the thumbwheel control was just not there. And we couldn't give the control to Mr. Jones, since he had to walk in and out of shots for the various narration scenes. The cord to the teleprompter was NOT long enough for him to be on the other side of a room and walk in.
I think the worst part about the whole experience was trying to do takes in the middle of a small town courthouse square in the middle of 15F temperatures, freezing rain, and wind. The teleprompter was pretty damned useless then because the glass kept fogging up due to the temperature changes.
My 2 cents.
IronChefMorimoto
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Actually, to get everything accurate and to compensate for the dissipation of the signal, you should use something like this:
/\/\/ O> 0O> \\
/ \\\/\/
That should just about handle it...
I understand most of this, except why you're attaching electrodes to your testicles.
Your explanation is close enough, but I'll make a minor optics nit-pick: TIR (Total Internal Reflection) is not involved. Bare glass reflects about 4% of the incident light. As the author indicates, that's enough to read high-contrast text. The other 96% of the light is transmitted up through the glass to the room ceiling. There would be light which is reflected from the top glass surface, then reflected again from the lower surface which makes it to the camera. So less than 0.2% (96%*4%*4%*96%) of the light reaches the camera, which is likely not detected.
ShoutingMan.com
Oh, the fun you can have with a teleprompter.
(sorry about the subject, couldn't resist)
This guy (and most teleprompter designs I've seen) both require that the image displayed on the screen is mirrored so that the reflected image is not mirrored.
Simple fix: have the point outward toward the subject and put a REAL mirror to reflect the image upwards in front of the display. Then put your beamsplitter glass in front of the lense. Think like it's a periscope.
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