How to Use a Teleprompter

The point of a teleprompter is to read a script while looking like you are speaking from memory. Screen position and script writing do most of that work.

Write the Script the Way You Speak

A script written like an article comes out, on camera, as an article being read aloud.

Read each line aloud as you write it. Keep sentences short enough to finish in one breath. Use contractions if you would use them. Cut any phrase you catch yourself tripping over: the prompter scrolls it past you at the same speed on every take.

Put the Screen as Close to the Lens as Possible

If the text is off to one side, your eyes visibly track sideways while you read.

• Best: a beamsplitter rig, where the text is reflected onto glass directly in front of the lens, so you read straight down the barrel. This needs the text mirrored (see the mirrored teleprompter guide).
• Good enough: a second screen or tablet immediately under the lens, as close as it will physically go, and far enough away that your eyes are not visibly scanning across a wide line.
• Avoid: the laptop you are recording on, off to the side of the camera. The angle between the camera and the text is at its widest here.

The further away the screen is, the smaller the angle your eyes travel, so a screen three metres back with large text reads better than the same text a metre away.

Font Size and Line Width

The right font size is whatever is comfortable from where you will actually be sitting or standing, so set it there rather than at your desk.

A line that holds five or six words can be taken in without the eye sweeping across it; a full-width line forces a visible left-to-right scan on every line. Narrow the text column until lines are short, and leave the alignment centred so your eyes return to roughly the same place each time.

What Speed Should a Teleprompter Scroll At?

Speed is set in words per minute. The right number depends on the material.

Audiobook narration sits around 150 words per minute, which is a useful reference point. Start at 140 and adjust after a paragraph.

If the piece has to fit a slot (a 90-second clip, a 15-minute lesson), work the other way round: enter the duration and let the prompter calculate the words per minute from the script length.

Record in Sections

In an unbroken take of a long script, a mistake near the end means recording all of it again. Pause at section boundaries instead, and when something goes wrong, scroll back to the last line you got right and pick it up from there rather than restarting from the top.

A prompter that lets you pick up from where you stopped saves re-recording what was already good.

Controlling the Scroll While You Record

The spacebar pauses and resumes, the arrow keys move through the script for as long as you hold one down, and the mouse wheel does the same with a glide. All of them assume you can reach the keyboard, which is a safe assumption at a desk and a bad one once the screen is in a rig in front of the camera.

A presentation clicker solves that. It shows up to the browser as a keyboard, and its two buttons send Page Up and Page Down, which this prompter reads as a jump of one line each way. Nothing to pair and nothing to configure: plug in the receiver, and the clicker nudges the script while you stay where you are standing.

Common Mistakes

• Reading, not talking. Look at the camera rather than at the text, and pause where you would pause in conversation.
• Chasing the scroll. If you are speeding up to keep pace with the text, the speed is wrong. Lower it.
• Setting the font size at your desk. It will be unreadable from where you actually stand.
• Scrolling a wall of text. Blank lines between paragraphs give you places to breathe and to stop the recording.

Open the teleprompter