You may remember back about February last year I waxed lyrical about a program called Teleprompter Pro?
This is a Windows app that costs a miserable AUD$9 from the Microsoft store and is everything you’d want in a pro teleprompter system plus a few bells and whistles more.
The one drawback I found with it was actually nothing to do with the programme itself, but more how to set it up to be eminently usable in terms of the hardware needed.
I use a Microsoft Surface Go, and it works brilliantly on this; my issue is setting up the Go in such a way that you are looking directly at the camera with the software running underneath.
I got by with various options – a stool with a few old Yellow Pages (‘member them?) to raise the Go up to just underneath the lens and propped on a book reader stand was the most successful. But it didn’t quite look the part, and looks are everything in the video biz don’t you agree?
Today with an hour to spend, I did some digging around for ways to mount a tablet to a tripod I could place next the Panasonic PV100 and Sennheiser MKE 600 mic I use on the main Manfrotto tripod. (Film professional Steve Turner did an excellent review of this camera here)
Amazon has a stack of ‘em ranging around the $30 mark on average, but I really wanted to buy local all things considered, with the economic climate, people in the industry out of work and all that sort of stuff.
So we were back to the UnHoly Trinity of JB HiFi, OfficeWorks and Harvey Norman (I knew JayCar didn’t carry anything along these lines as I have their cattle-dog which is well worth the $5 by the way. An’ no, they don’t pay me, but they should).
After recent attempts to buy things and finding the on-hand stock levels showed by these companies on-line often lied through its teeth, a short drive to town was warranted as all of these businesses are within spitting distance of each other. Apparently, Kmart also carried such a beast but all stores in local WA showed out of stock so that looked like a discontinued item to me so didn’t bother there and anyway, they are miles away..
But tromping from one store to the next drew blank. Nil stock everywhere or we don’t carry anything like that.
To cheer myself up, I thought I’d take a small detour to ToyWorld.
Last year we did a story on UK videographer Doug Wilson who builds model train sets and then uses very clever masking in Vegas Pro 17 to set them inside a real world. Using composite video captured from GoPros attached to the trains and carriages, we then get some fantastic imagery that is hard to discern from the real thing.
Check it out here
I have been thinking for a while about doing something similar as back in the UK in the 60s we had a monster Hornby 00 train set, and ToyWorld had some starter kits I wanted to look at.
This took me past the local CameraHouse and bugger me, on the counter was the very thing I was after, albeit attached to a very expensive $400 tripod!
$20 later (plus another $49 for an el cheapo tripod to mount it on permanently, and I had solved my problem as you can see.
Give Away:
Phil Littlewood the creator and developer of Teleprompter Pro has just given me 3 licences to give away! All you need do is install the trial version and then email me at david@auscamonline..com what the latest version number is. If you also subscribe to our free e-magazine and newsletter via the pop up you see, you get TWO bites at winning!
Here is also a video tutorial on using Teleprompter Pro
Film, Video & Virtual reality 