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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.
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 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.