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Another thing to try...
If your comfotable working with electronics:
Open an old TV or VGA monitor. (The kind with a CRT) On the back side of the picture tube you will find 2 coils of wire. One coil controlls the vertical sweep of the electron beam that draws the picture on the screen. The other controlls the horizontal. If you remove and reverse the wires leading to the horizontal coil you will in effect reverse the scanning on the screen. That will cause everything to be backwards. (If you do the same to the vertical coil the screen flips upside down.) It might be brighter than an LCD and there would be less hassle in preparing your prompts. Be carefull inside a TV or monitor though! Lots of high voltge in there.
Excellent Article
his is a great article and saved me hundreds of dollars. I constructed the prompter in about two days. The diagram in the article was easy to follow. I stabilized it a bit more than the diagram and it worked perfectly for a shoot I did that needed a prompter.
I found a great softwear called "Presentation Prompter," under $100, put it on my laptop, controlled it with a mouse and it all worked perfectly.
The talent, who had never used a prompter before, had no trouble at all.
Thank you very much!
Plus, you can automatically scroll!
Love Brian's article and it inspired me to discover that you can even make the teleprompter scroll.
Turn on Automaticaly Scroll from the View menu. Then, to control the speed hit the up or down arrows on the keyboard. You can even make it go BACKWARD!
Pretty neat, but I have a suggestion.
With the addition of a mirror parallel to the plate glass, you can set up your teleprompter in a more parascopic setup. This should allow you to view normally formatted text in the teleprompter without needing to reverse it, and would also allow the laptop to sit upright, making use of the keyboard more natural. I'd draw a sketch, but I have no place to put it, and I do not currently have the resources to construct a working prototype. I can be reached at bkofford at g mail dot com.
Great article!
Having worked in the television industry for years, I always found the specialized equipment a little over priced myself. Like the telepromter, a number of things could be made yourself if you just put your mind to it. Thanks for showing us how you did it! I also had a co-worker who built his own jib after studying one on a shoot.
Another suggestion on your design might be to add some black felt or cloth on the sides to shield it from lights, thus making the screen easier to read. Most of the telepromters I used also cover the area from the lens to the glass, giving you a black background behind the glass.