When should you use a teleprompter when making YouTube videos? Can it make you more comfortable and professional, or will it make you seem forced? Brighton West shows you how to do it.
GUEST: Brighton West of Brighton West Video [YouTube].
HOST: The Video Marketing Value Podcast is hosted by Dane Golden of VidiUp | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube
SPONSORS: This episode is brought to you by our affiliate partners, including: TubeBuddy, VidIQ, MorningFame, Rev.com, and other products and services we recommend.
PRODUCER: Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios
TRANSCRIPT
Brighton recommends the Caddie Buddy Teleprompter (Brighton’s Amazon affiliate link) and the PromptSmart app. Here’s also a free teleprompter website that Dane has tried a few times: CuePrompter.
Dane Golden:
It’s time for Hey.com. This is the podcast where we give you video content marketing tips to help you get your customers coming back to your videos again and again. My name is Dane Golden from Hey.com, and today we have Brighton West from Brighton West Video. Brighton helps speakers, authors, and coaches with their video presence. Welcome, Brighton!
Brighton West:
Thank you, Dane from Hey.com.
Dane Golden:
Brighton, I asked you here today to tell us about teleprompters. What I like about your channel is you have a few videos about teleprompters, and I know you help your clients with that. Most people don’t really know about teleprompters and how easy or hard they are. Are they comfortable, does it make people more comfortable, is it too forced, are there reflections? Could you tell us a little bit about how you start determining whether you should use a teleprompter or not?
Brighton West:
Okay, well thanks, Dane. I think first thing I want to do is make sure people understand what a teleprompter is. That’s kind of like, I always think about when the president is speaking- maybe not the current one, because he likes to ad lib- but there’s the glass panes, which we can see through as the audience, but they’re seeing the scripts scrolling on their side. It’s kind of like a one-way mirror. They’ve really come down in cost. They used to be something that were thousands of dollars, and if you wanted to use one, you had to hire someone to operate it for you. Now, it’s really, I mean, there’s a bunch of them on the market that are just things that you add your iPad to and/or your iPhone or Android device, and you’ve got the same thing that the professionals had for thousands of dollars for maybe 150 or so.
Dane Golden:
A teleprompter, if I hear you right, it is something that people have used for speeches for a long time, but they’re very expensive. Now, because of iPads and how other technology has come down in price, you can see the words while you’re looking at the camera. How’s that possible?
Brighton West:
Yeah, so essentially, I mean, it’s like a one-way mirror. The camera is behind looking through the glass and the iPad is being reflected on the glass. You just have, like, a dark curtain behind so that everything behind it, it’s really super easy to read. Yeah, something, and they’ve been using them on TV too in front of TV cameras for the longest time, too.
Dane Golden:
Right. We’ve, I’ve tested this with you before, and it’s super interesting how it works. I don’t have one of my own, but how do I decide if I need one? Let’s start off …
Brighton West:
Well, yeah. Let me go through a couple scenarios that help. I use one for most of my videos because it makes it so much faster for me to record if I write out a script and carefully choose the words in advance, and then just kind of go through reading it. I can often just nail it in one take, or maybe even two takes. Speed is one great thing, and accuracy, too. You have to be very accurate with your language. Reading is dead-on. You can write that script and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and then just nail it once. That’s a great thing to do.
Brighton West:
Of course, it is reading, so it’s a little less personal. I’ve got some tips on my website about how you can move around, and kind of try to add your personality back in, because the teleprompter, it takes a little bit away. It takes a little energy away. If you’re just standing really, standing still and looking at the teleprompter and reading …
Dane Golden:
It’s like a hostage video!
Brighton West:
Yeah, exactly. Definitely. Yeah.
Dane Golden:
I am doing fine here, nobody needs to worry about me.
Brighton West:
Yes, exactly. Pay them the money. Yeah, that’s exactly it. If you’re animated, moving around, because your eyes do move back and forth just a little bit as you’re reading. Extra movement on screen, it adds that energy back and it also starts to hide that eye movement. The other thing that we’ve done together, Dane, you know this, this is something that I’ve brought you over to give this a test was instead of putting the script up on the screen, putting another person on the screen. It’s like having a computer monitor right in front of the lens. If you’re having trouble just connecting with the camera and feeling awkward looking directly at a camera, you can put a picture of someone, or your dog, up there. Then it feels like you’re talking to that person, and you can also do this with FaceTime, where someone else is in another room listening to you and reacting to everything you’re saying.
Brighton West:
It looks like you’re FaceTiming with them, like you’re looking directly into their eyes, but the camera’s behind that, recording what you’re saying. There’s I think a number of possibilities here that go beyond what’s traditional with a teleprompter.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, and I’ll link to that test we did, and I wrote a blog post about it and everything. It was really interesting. I really do believe that when you look at another face, your face changes and becomes more personable and animated. People want to engage. That’s why I always tell people to look at the camera and these so-called professional videos where you are looking off-camera can, in the YouTube world, or the Facebook video or Instagram video world, be off putting.
Brighton West:
Yeah. It’s interesting. Right before we started recording this, I got a message from a friend who’s recording someone. She’s like, “Okay, well, should I tell them to look at the screen, or should I sit off-camera?” I was like, “Ooh, I’m glad you asked. Tell them to look at the screen.” You’re right, if it is social media video, that’s a lot more important, I guess, if you’re shooting a documentary or something, you can have that 60 Minutes style. Looking into the camera is looking into your audience’s eyes.
Dane Golden:
Also, I want you to give me your Amazon code to post in the show notes to whatever item you recommend so you can get the commission for it.
Brighton West:
Thank you.
Dane Golden:
What do you recommend, and how much does it cost for a setup type of thing?
Brighton West:
Yeah, so the teleprompter that I’ve fallen in love with is called the Caddie Buddy. I’ll have that link in the show notes, I guess. I own now I think three different teleprompters, and the Caddie Buddy is just the most flexible. It’ll work with your DSLR, your video camera, with your iPhone. It’ll work with a webcam. It also works with all sorts of devices in terms of Android or iPads or iPhones. It’s just incredibly flexible, and kind of folds flat for storage. It’s really a great tool, because there are so many different ways to use it, and it’s a high-quality tool. It costs about $150 on Amazon, but it is just amazing compared to some of the others that I’ve used. One of the older ones, there were a lot of little problems that I had with it that I tried to overcome. It cost about the same amount of money. I think it was called Impact or something like that.
Brighton West:
Then another one that I just recently bought is the Parrot teleprompter. I’m actually about to put a review on my channel for the Parrot teleprompter. It’s a really small one, costs about $100, but it’s limited in terms of the types of cameras that it’ll work with. It’ll work with a DSLR and it’ll work with a video camera, but it won’t work with an iPad or a webcam, but it’s real simple.
Dane Golden:
We are, it goes without saying that the teleprompter unit, you still need your iPad, you still need … The iPad is the part where the text reads, but then you also need, of course, an additional camera, whether it’s a phone or a regular DSLR camera or whatever. Those need to work, those three types of units, need the teleprompter, the iPad, and the camera, need to work together.
Brighton West:
Correct, yes. Yeah, the Caddie Buddy is the one that makes that work most universally.
Dane Golden:
How does the text go across the screen? How do you determine how fast it goes?
Brighton West:
Great question. The software that I recommend using is called PromptSmart, and it’s available for iPhone and Android now. It’s a little bit expensive for an app on a phone, I think it’s about $30, but it actually is able to listen to, it uses the microphone of your iPad and listens to your voice and scrolls the screen accordingly. Typically, just a few years ago, we didn’t have that app or with some of the other apps that are available in the marketplace right now, you have to set a speed.
Dane Golden:
How much does that cost? How much does that cost?
Brighton West:
That app is about $30.
Dane Golden:
$30, okay.
Brighton West:
I think there might be a free trial or something.
Dane Golden:
No, I sent you a free website that can do this. I don’t know if it works on iOS, but I’ll put that in the show notes also if people want to save the $30 and do it slightly less professionally, but also give us a link to that so that people want to do it more pro, they can.
Brighton West:
Yep.
Dane Golden:
What about me with glasses, what do you, have you tested it too much with glasses?
Brighton West:
Yeah, I haven’t used it a lot with glasses. I think the main thing with glasses is where’s your lighting? Being able to get your lights up nice and high, like one of mine, my film light I have bouncing off my ceiling, and then making sure the other light, so that the reflection off the glasses is bouncing down. You don’t typically see the teleprompter in the glasses. It’s not bright enough for that, but typically the lights from your studio or whatever you’re using, those are what’s showing up in glasses.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, and you actually gave me some really great tips with lighting, now that I’ve started wearing glasses all the time. Basically what I’m doing is I’m just coming from the left and the right. I really can’t do it as well as you have, but I just set it up equally on the left and right, and it seems to work okay.
Brighton West:
Yeah, sometimes it’s hard. Like with mine, I wish my ceiling were another three feet higher just so that I had more flexibility with how I set up my lights, but you know, I don’t think my wife would like it if I started tearing the ceiling out of this spare bedroom.
Dane Golden:
Again, the using a teleprompter, the reason to do that is to get you to look at the camera and make you look more comfortable. Is that it? Is that why we should do it?
Brighton West:
Yes, I mean, really if you’re having trouble remembering your lines and getting through your script, and a lot of people start by just putting their notes off to the side or trying to read while looking off-camera, it just, it doesn’t look good. Being able to look directly at the camera if you need a script, or if you need a picture of someone in that camera, it definitely, it improves that, allows you to look directly into your audience’s eyes.
Dane Golden:
Great, great. This has been an excellent conversation, Brighton. Very interesting in seeing how people will start using teleprompters more often. How can people find out more about what you’re doing?
Brighton West:
Yeah, great, so you can head to my website, which is Brighton West Video, or my YouTube channel, which is YouTube front slash Brighton West Video. Yeah, I would love to talk to people. I love helping folks get this stuff set up. I like working with people who are DIY, they want to do some of it themselves at least. I’ve got lots of people that have set up this particular teleprompter with my help.
Dane Golden:
Excellent, thanks. My name is Dane Golden, and I want to thank you for listening today. Hey.com is about helping you get your customers coming back to your videos again and again. How do you do this? By sharing your expertise, because when you share your expertise in a way that helps your customers live their lives better or do their jobs better, you’ll earn their loyalty and their trust and their business. Thanks to our special guest, Brighton West. Please subscribe to us on YouTube and wherever you watch social video, and please friend me on LinkedIn. Until next week, here’s to helping you help your customers through video.