What is a Teleprompter?

Here is the answer to the question what is a teleprompter?

Teleprompters have become pretty common these days and are used all over the world in professional production studio all the way to the basements of a Youtube video blogger; however, we still find that a lot of people don't really know what a teleprompter is. So we created this page to help you understand.

 

Short description of a teleprompter

A teleprompter is a device that scrolls text on a one-way mirror that sits in front of a camera lens so that the subject can read words that are scrolling in the reflection of the mirror while at the same time you look directly into the lens of the camera.

presidential Teleprompters
Long Description of a teleprompter

A Teleprompter is a piece of hardware that holds a beamsplitter mirror at a 45-degree angle away from the lens of your camera. The beamsplitter mirror both reflects and allows light to pass through which is what makes it work so well for teleprompters.
The hardware, if engineered correctly should allow you to center the lens of your camera to the back of the mirror allowing the camera to look through the mirror at the subject in front of it. Usually, there is some type of an enclosure that shields light from getting between the mirror and the lens (the darker the bitter).
One the front of the mirror, laying flat, and facing straight into the air, there is some type of display device(monitor, smartphone, tablet, etc.) that has scrolling words. These words need to be inverted because if they are not, the text will appear backward in the reflection.
The scrolling text is controlled by a program that allows the operator to pause, speed-up, slow-down, or stop the scrolling. What the operator sees, is what the talent sees. So the job of the operator is to read along with that talent and advance the words so that the talent always sees what they need to read next.

 

Mainly a teleprompter is a tool that can make your life a lot easier and save you a lot of embarrassment and time, keep you on point, and allow you to focus on the presentation rather than trying to remember the line.  

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