30. 04. 2026
Documentation
By now we know how to use a teleprompter from the point of view of a content creator in front of the camera. But remember, that’s not all we do in our world of limited resources. We’re also the audio engineer, cameraman, lighting director, and so many other roles.
So today instead I want to go through with you the preparatory work that goes into setting up the teleprompter before we can actually use it, operating the software side where we boot up our tablet, load the script, and press play, and then how you can manage the small details while you’re actually in the middle of a recording session.
Let’s start off with a run-through of a typical session, and then we’ll look at some a list of advanced features you might want in teleprompter software.
Running a Teleprompter by Yourself
I use a tablet to display the script because it’s easiest to use a free webapp even if Teleprompter apps are available, not only because the cost is less, but because I don’t have to worry about someone else changing the feature set. I can even change some of the details myself or add a feature if I find I need one. And to top it off, I can save it offline and put it on any device with a web browser.
So what kinds of things can go wrong with a teleprompter in daily use? Well, all of these things I’m about to tell you didn’t all happen to me on a single day, but I did experience each of them multiple times over the last few years.
So imagine you’ve set up your hardware along the lines of my previous post. And now…
Software/Script Setup
You notice that you forgot to turn on the tablet ahead of time. You’ll now get to twiddle your thumbs for several minutes. Or worse, you forgot to turn it off last time and now the battery is dead. That’ll be several more minutes at least, please.
You also might find yourself spending 15 minutes trying to load your script via Bluetooth file transfer, or the same amount of time trying to copy it via USB cable or flash card, because you have to go through all the connection settings, find the right path, and then with a multi-fingered magician’s trick start the copy.
Time to Press “Record”
As you finally sit down to check that the script is visible from where you’re sitting or standing, you notice the effect of your set lighting on the glass of your teleprompter: light is reflecting off your white shirt or the wall and then onto the glass again, because some light is leaking through the back or around the sides, or the tablet’s screen isn’t bright enough, or the particular text colors you chose look feeble.
You’re in the right spot, your clothes aren’t scrunched up, and you can finally ready to start recording, but wait! Your smartphone is attached to the back of your teleprompter. Time to get up, walk around to the back, press the record button, and go back to your spot. Fun!
Wait, wait, get back up again! You forgot to set the playback/scroll speed, font size, margins, etc. Any false step means doing it all over again, because these factors also collectively affect the number of words scrolling upwards per second. This holds for any other functionality requiring interacting with the tablet.
Smile and Read
Now you settle in and start reading comfortably. Suddenly see a mistake in your script, then another! Anything from bad spelling to a sentence you wanted to change but forgot to. What do you do? For now you could just muddle through if the problem isn’t too serious. Wouldn’t it be better though to edit the script in place without having to do all those steps above all over again? And what if you could save those changes for later?
The text of the script isn’t the only thing you can edit, though. You’ve probably marked up the text to add colors that represent something, or you’ve added FontAwesome icons to represent gestures, facial expressions, or when to point to something. If one of those wrong, it’s not as easy to edit as plain text is.
Making Mistakes
While reading did you mispronounce a word, say the wrong thing, or maybe just not speak quickly enough, so the text scrolled offscreen? Well, you’ll have to scroll back upwards some amount and start over. Guess what, scrolling upwards means getting up, walking to the tablet, finding a good spot in the script where you can start over, then walking back, …
Last but not least, if you’re like me, then you often make mistakes and have to do multiple takes of more than one scene. How do you remember which one is the best so you can delete the others without worrying? I used to go with what seemed a good rule: “The last take was best, because otherwise I would’ve done another take that was better.” Alas, that’s not always the case, especially when you’re under time pressure.
A Preferable Teleprompter Workflow
What a disaster. Surely we can do better with a bit of planning and work. And by “do better” I mean both reducing the amount of time you spend recording (before, during and after), and improving quality by minimizing mistakes, imposing some calm, and not having to fix your clothes (and hair, for those vain ones amongst you) after walking around so much.
So what would it look like if we could draw up our own ideal scenario, just conceptually for now? I can synthesize the above into six main points right away:
- A “pre-flight” checklist of tasks to check or do before we start
- Streamlining how the script is loaded
- Methods to remain “in recording position” as much as possible
- Be able to edit the content of our script in a persistent way
- Be able to change any prompting parameters in a persistent way
- Finding a method to make real-time notes that won’t interrupt
There are many ways we could reach these goals, but we’re going to have to settle for something specific that we can actually accomplish.
Well Then, Let’s Make That More Specific
So let’s break those down as much as possible into some generic project specs that would meat those goals and might actually be doable (in code or otherwise):
- Write down your pre-flight checklist or print it out, and put it at the top of your equipment box so it’s the first thing you see before you touch any hardware. Think of it as your README.txt. Update it every time you see anything you can improve.
- Don’t load your script by hand anymore: no USB or BT, unless your internet connection is down. Take a lesson from DevOps and have a single source of truth that you can update and download from anywhere. (Can anyone say”GitHub”?) Think of script changes as commits. Speed things up even more by automatically downloading the most recent script as soon as you start up your app or webapp. (Have a backup option in case you’re on location where there’s no connection.)
- Make as many teleprompter controls as possible work via remote control. There’s a lot of functions we need to do, so make sure all of them can be done with a single controller (admittedly, this is the most complicated part of this list).
- Some controls are run by the OS and not the teleprompter app. For instance, changing screen brightness. In fact, using a mouse-based BT controller to mouse through tablet menus isn’t much faster than doing it by hand. But there are still workarounds, for instance, if you set your screen to always be on high brightness, then a webapp could use (adjustable) CSS to change the transparency of a dark top layer (add “Highest tablet screen brightness” to your pre-flight).
- How do we start recording while sitting down? Many smartphones have voice commands you can enable. For instance, on my Samsung I can say “Record Video” just like other phones take a picture if you say “Smile” or “Cheese” loudly and slowly.
- Many teleprompter apps let you edit the script on the screen itself if the hardware has touch control. The problem is you might want to edit other things besides text, like adding emojis, color backgrounds, or just a bit of markdown. If we had some open source teleprompter code, we could easily add that functionality ourselves, e.g. in JavaScript.
- And once you make changes to the script, you probably don’t want to throw them away in case you have to do another iteration. So thanks again, git, GitHub and DevOps, we can use you for that, too! We just push any changes onto the default branch. (Remember to automate this part, or you can easily spend more time managing it than you would repeatedly stopping and starting your session.
- If we make scroll speed, font size, margins, etc. be a part of the script that can be read by the webapp, we can also keep those parameters around via git (Config as Code!) As long as we use the same tablet, we should only need a single configuration set, with maybe some small variations on speed depending on how fast the speaker should talk.
- To continue recording after you make a mistake while reading the script, you typically just “unscroll” the script to the right spot by dragging it. It would be nice to have some buttons like “go up one page” or “go to previous scene” on our remote, which now needs additional buttons…
- Finally, we need a few more buttons to mark whether a take was good or not, or some other kind of live feedback. Now our remote needs even more buttons, and we’re going to have to memorize which function is where. (How about adding a printed cheatsheet to our pre-flight checklist?)
Action Plan
We can do most of that directly in software, mostly using techniques we either already know, or can easily learn. In fact, I sense a challenge…
So next time, we’re going to look through a few open source Teleprompter apps, see how they’re constructed, and see if we can improve on them. I can almost guarantee you they don’t handle the software feature set above. And why depend on someone else when you can easily do it yourself?
These Solutions are Engineered by Humans
Did you like this article? Does it reflect your skills? Würth Phoenix is always looking for talented, enthusiastic individuals to help us drive our business. In fact, we’re currently hiring for many different roles here at Würth IT Italy.
Charles Callaway
Author
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