Teleprompter for iPad, from a browser tab

Why a tablet is the easy case

Most of what makes a prompter work is distance. The screen has to be close enough to the lens that your eyes barely move, and far enough from your face that you are not visibly focusing on something a foot away. A phone forces you to choose. An iPad is about the size of the glass on a hardware prompter, so it can sit two or three steps back from you and still be comfortable to read.

That is most of what a tablet buys you. The tool is the same on every device; the size of the screen is what changes.

Distance, text size and line length

Text size runs from 24 to 96, starting at 44. Rather than picking a number, set the iPad up where it will be, stand where you will be standing, press Play and read a paragraph out loud. If you are reaching for the words, go up two steps. If a line holds fewer than about six words, come back down.

If you find yourself at the top of the range and still squinting, the problem is the distance and not the setting. Move the iPad closer to the camera and the camera closer to you, or accept a slightly wider shot. A prompter you can only just read produces a very particular flat delivery, because most of your attention is going into decoding rather than talking.

Standing it up

The iPad wants to be directly beside the lens, at the height of your eyes, and angled so the screen faces you square on. A tripod with a tablet clamp does this properly. A stand on the desk behind the camera does it well enough, as long as the top of the iPad is close to the lens rather than a long way under it.

Check two things before you record. A glossy tablet screen reflects whatever is behind you, so tilt it a few degrees until the window or the key light is out of it. And a tablet on a light stand is heavier than it looks; a clamp that holds a phone will not always hold this one.

The stage follows the window, not the tablet

The stage sizes itself to the browser window. Put the browser in a narrower window or beside another app and the stage narrows with it: lines rewrap sooner, and the reading line stays across the middle of whatever the stage now is.

That is usually fine, and occasionally it is the point. If you are on a call in one half of the screen and reading in the other, expect to raise the text size, because the column just got much narrower and the words per line dropped with it.

What a keyboard adds

With a hardware keyboard attached, the shortcuts are the quickest way to work. Space plays and pauses, M flips the mirror, F goes fullscreen. Cmd+V pastes a script straight onto the page without tapping into the box first, which is the fastest way to get a new draft onto the iPad.

The shortcuts stop working while the caret is in the script box, so that typing the word "mirror" into a script does not flip the picture. And once you have tabbed to a control, Space presses that control instead of starting the roll, the way any button on any page behaves.

Without a keyboard, everything the shortcuts do has a button in the dock along the bottom of the stage.

Mirror mode and beam splitters

A tablet is the screen most beam splitter rigs are built around. The iPad lies face up in the hood, the half silvered glass sits at an angle above it, and you read the reflection through the glass while the camera shoots through it from the other side. Your eyes end up on the lens axis, which is as close to eye contact as this gets.

A reflection reverses the text left to right, so the script has to be reversed before it goes into the mirror. That is what the mirror control does. Only the script is flipped, so the dock is still legible when you look down at it. You can also open the stage with mirror already on if that is how your rig always runs. The rest of the setup is on the mirror mode page.

If nothing is reflecting the screen, leave mirror off. Without the glass there is nothing to turn the text back the right way round.

Colour, and the light coming off the screen

The dock has a text colour and a background colour. On an iPad these are lighting decisions more than taste ones, because a tablet this size held near your face is a light source in the shot.

A white stage throws a soft light back at you, which can be a free fill light in a dim room and can also blow out one side of your face if the iPad is close. A dark stage with light text disappears in a dark room, which is what you want when the iPad is next to the lens and you would rather not see a rectangle reflected in your glasses. Try a take each way before deciding.

Several scripts, and knowing how long each one runs

The dock has a script switcher and a button for starting a new one, so a piece with an intro, three segments and an outro can be five scripts rather than one long scroll you have to find your place in. Recue takes you back to the top of whichever one is open.

Next to the transport there is a duration, worked out from the same words per minute the roll is using. Switch scripts and the duration changes with it. That is how you find out that segment two is four minutes long before you record it rather than afterwards.

When the iPad is also the camera

If you are filming on the iPad's own front camera, the script cannot be on that screen at the same time; the camera app is in front of everything else. Use a second device for the script, or film on something else. The iPhone page covers the smaller version of the same problem.

Where the script is kept

Your script sits in this browser on this iPad. It is not uploaded and it is not synced, so a script written on a laptop is not waiting here. Move it over by pasting it in, and keep the original somewhere you control, because clearing this browser's data clears the scripts with it.

The prompter itself is on the home page, and it is the same stage this page describes.