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Prompter UniversityPO Box 11929
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What Is Teleprompting? In the context of television, prompting is the mechanism that allows staff (the folks behind the camera) to remind talent (the folks in front of the camera) what to say during a show. Prompting is most prevalent during the nightly news broadcasts. But, as you are no doubt aware, prompting finds it way into several partitions of our lives including the speeches that you watch of our president. Prompting has evolved over the years into quite sophistocated systems that not only help your local news anchor remember what he wants to tell you each night, but also assists your company president get his message out to his employes, or help the President get his message out to We-The-People, and assist Jay Leno in remembering all those jokes he told you last night. In the early days of television, news anchors would rely on a printed script from which they would religiously read the nightly news. The idea of not letting some of these loose canons unilaterally interpret the news for their own agenda pretty much dictated that some form of scripting was necessary to the long term survival of television news in general and your local channel in particular. The printed script, while still visible on the evening news set in more recent times, is relagated to a backup roll in the event the electronic teleprompter (or its operator) fails. Some news anchors were so adroit at this news anchor job that they were able to basically memorize their portion of the news. But it took a special kind of newscaster to do that, and it was very hard to train others to follow suit. Memorization is a lot of work, and burn-out was sooner rather than later for most of these news anchor heros. Because of the shear volume of text in a news broadcast, cue cards were not an option. However, cue cards found their way into the less text intensive application such as for talk show host reminders, performance lyrics for musicians, and stage play dialog hints. But even today, cue cards have their place. Letterman still uses cue cards for his reminders, probably more for nostalgic throwback, than for any other benefit. However, cue cards have one really significant drawback - no matter how close you set the cue card to the lens of the tv camera, you can still tell that the news anchor is reading off-camera as their eyes drift away from the lens to read the script. The riveting eye-contact, which was beginning to be recognized in the television industry as a way that consumers were inferring credability of the news anchor, and therefor the quality of the newscast, was some way going to have to be accomplished. And the single mirror reflector teleprompter was born. Text was writen by hand onto a continuous roll of paper which was placed under a small B&W camera. The signal from this camera was sent to a small a/v monitor placed under the television camera lens, pointing up at a 45* mirror placed in front of the lens. The text reflected off the monitor was read by the news anchor while he appeared to be looking straight into the camera lens, as an assistant unrolled the printed text under the B&W camera in synchronization to the anchor's reading speed. The effect was the required riveting eye contact with the viewers that broadcasters wanted. It didn't take long to realize that the preparation of the script for reading on the 6 O'Clock News took a significant amount of time, and hand printed scripts did not lend themselves to late breaking news changes, which meant that the entire script had to be rewriten, or had to be adlibbed by the news anchor (which is NOT what broadcasters wanted). So, as automatic memory typewriters, then personal computers became available, the nightly new text was being stored in files which could be edited and the rolls reprinted quickly in the event of breaking news, or a change in lineup for the evening. Another approach to this news broadcast volitility was to outfit anchors with an earpiece from which he would listen to the news being read by an assistant off camera. The anchor would have to repeat each word immediately as he heard it in his ear. While effective, it took enormous training and experience to become proficient in using the ear-prompter, and quickly lost favor with broadcasters. The final step in the evolution of the teleprompter for today's local new anchor was for enterprising programmers to develop smooth scrolling, large format font programs that would run on personal computers which could send scrolling text to these under-lens monitors and replace the printed rolls of text.
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