Online Teleprompter

Why your phone is the missing half of a teleprompter

The hard part of reading to camera was never the scrolling. It is that the controls are on the same screen as the words, so the moment the speed is wrong you have to reach out of frame, find a slider, and start the take again. That is why so many recordings are ruined by a hand appearing at the edge of the shot.

Every prompter here has a code. Open that code on a second device and the two screens are one session: the speed, the size, the margins, the mirroring and the script itself are shared, and a change on either one lands on the other straight away. So the screen you read from can sit behind the lens with nothing on it but your words, while the phone in your lap does the driving.

It works in either direction, which matters more than it sounds. Put your phone on the tripod as the prompter and drive it from the laptop off camera, and you have the setup people buy hardware for.

Everything without touching the mouse

A control you have to click is a control you cannot use while you are on camera, so every one of them is also a key. Set the take up once, put your hands back where they belong, and adjust from the keyboard or from the other device.

• Play and pause the scrollSpace
• Nudge the script up or down↑↓
• Slower and faster←→
• Smaller and larger text-+
• Tighter and wider margins[]
• Centre or left alignA
• Mirror for a beam splitter rigH
• Flip top to bottomV

Reading to camera without sounding like you are reading

• Write it the way you say it. A sentence that reads well on paper is usually too long to say in one breath, and the place you run out of air is the place a viewer hears the script.
• Pull the margins in. A narrow column keeps your eyes near the lens instead of sweeping across the screen, which is the movement that gives the game away.
• Get the screen as close to the lens as you can, and as far from your face as you can still read. Distance is what makes your eye line look like it is on the camera.
• Set the speed by reading the first paragraph out loud, not by looking at the number. Then leave it, and nudge it with the arrow keys mid take rather than starting again.
• Put a blank line where you want a pause. The scroll does not know you are making a point, so build the beat into the script.

Nothing is uploaded, and nothing is kept

Your script travels between the devices in your own session and is never written down anywhere. There is no database row for it, which is why there is no account to make and no consent screen to read.

The other side of that: when the last device leaves the session, the script leaves with it. Write it somewhere you keep things and paste it in, rather than treating this page as where the words live.