Most of them are tinted, being designed to block light and UV, and though reflective are not suitable to shooting video through. I researched window films for two months. What about something transparent, reflective, and very thin, like Saran wrap tightly stretched on a frame? That might work, but it would be very delicate, and any wrinkle would surely distort the video. It works, but since both sides are equally reflective from both sides, it makes a double-image that’s sure to make you rub your eyes a lot. Some people just use regular window glass. The first question is the mirror: to buy the “real” stuff, at nearly $100 per square foot, or will something else work almost as well, at much lower cost? Well, no… When I started looking up Youtube videos about homemade teleprompters, I came across several that were very cheap and looked pretty ineffective and several others that looked effective but quite expensive. One of these “pro-ish” things is learning to both write, and read, a script, and for that, you need a teleprompter. It takes a lot of study and practice! And the more you can do like the pros do it, the better it will be. But making better video is about more than just snazzy hardware. In other words, we’ve never had it so good, when it comes to video. Not as capable or flexible as a $25,000 pro HD camera, to be sure, but actually quite excellent for the $100 home user. Indeed, I made one for just over $100, which when added to the existing used laptop and webcam, makes a fully-functional teleprompter that works just as well as the professional rigs that coast thousands of dollars.Īnd the best part is, you can read your script and look straight at the camera, thus improving your delivery by making eye-contact (as it were) with the viewers.Īnother interesting development is that the top-end web-cams now support full HD video, with hardware compression in the camera, and they will take very nice HD video indeed. But with the proliferation of laptops and tablet computers, which many people already have, adding the special glass, and a simple frame to hold it in position, has made homemade teleprompters a reality. The result is that teleprompters tend to be quite expensive, with the special glass and commercial TV monitor making up most of the cost. What’s not so simple is making that special mirror glass: an extremely thin layer of aluminum is applied, atom by atom, in an expensive industrial process called thin-film sputtering. But is seems almost like magic when you can see the text so well, and the camera doesn’t see it at all! The secret is that it must be very dark on the camera side of the mirror, just like those dark observation rooms next to interrogation rooms with the mirror between them. It’s very distracting! I had earlier made a bracket to hold my webcam in the center of the screen, but that approach is not optimal, so I finally decided to build a proper teleprompter.Ī teleprompter is actually a very simple device: it uses a (so-called) one-way mirror to reflect scrolling text, while the camera shoots right through it. I was watching webcam videos (including some of mine) and became annoyed by people always looking at their monitor, and not at the camera.
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