A teleprompter for YouTube, from a Short to a forty-minute take.

Two kinds of YouTube script, two different modes

A Short is written to a length. Constant mode runs at a fixed speed set in words per minute, the one setting that tells you how long a take will run before you shoot it. Divide the word count by the pace, trim until that number is the runtime you want, and the last word lands on cue.

Anything longer is the opposite problem: over twenty minutes a fixed pace is what makes people sound like they are reading. Voice mode recognises the words you actually said and scrolls to them, so you can stop mid-sentence, take a second run at a name, or slow right down over a figure. Sound mode advances while it hears you speak, for conditions where recognition is unreliable. Recognition runs on your iPhone where your language supports it; where it does not, iOS sends the audio to Apple to convert it to text. The language picker marks those languages before you start. The voice teleprompter page takes all three apart.

The start delay, and what people mean by a countdown

There is no 3-2-1 countdown in any mode. The count before a take is the start delay, and when it ends, Voice and Sound wait for you to speak before the script moves.

Before the take you pick a start delay: off, or 5, 10 or 20 seconds. Every mode has one, and Constant is where it earns its place, because Constant starts moving whether or not you do. It is the gap where you tap record, walk to your mark and get your hands down.

It is drawn inside the floating window as well as full screen, so with the phone on a tripod and the camera app in front, you can still watch the seconds run out.

Mirror and rotation, for a beam-splitter rig

A beam-splitter is the glass hood that reflects the script into the lens’s line of sight. On one of those the text has to be flipped horizontally, and Mirror does that.

Rotation is the other half of a rig. “Rotate text” turns the script a quarter turn clockwise with each tap, in full screen and in the floating window alike, so it reads the right way up whichever way round the phone is clamped in the hood. The window is Wide 3:2, Tall 2:3 or Strip, a thin band sized for two lines. Its side margins are set separately from the full-screen prompter, because you read glass at a different distance from a phone in your hand. The text size follows the script’s own, scaled to whichever shape you picked.

Plan one thing around it: nothing inside the floating window responds to touch. That is an iOS constraint, and it is why the voice commands exist. Pause, continue, go back a sentence, start over or jump to the end by saying so, in ten languages, with editable phrases. The volume buttons are marked Experimental and do not work inside camera apps, which take them for the shutter. So on a rig it is voice: tracking keeps following while you record in Camera, and if the camera app does take the microphone, the text holds on the word you reached and a note says “Mic busy”. Wispim keeps asking for the microphone back and carries on from that word when it has it. The floating window page has both halves of that.

Typography for a script that runs twenty minutes

Text size, side margins, line spacing, font weight and the position of the reading line all adjust. On a Short the defaults are fine, because a minute is over before the type can tire you. A forty-minute take is where setting them matters, and the page for teachers goes through what each one does over a long read. On a shoot, pinch to change text size mid-take. If the phone ends up further from your eyes than you planned, you do not have to start the take again.

Video podcasts, where the script is a structure

Two people and a long take rarely follow a script word for word. What you bring is a running order: the questions, and the figure you must not misquote. A fixed pace suits that badly, because a running order is somewhere to come back to. Voice mode lets the script sit still through the tangent your guest goes on, and when the conversation lands somewhere the order did not, you drag ahead to the question you now want and start reading there. In Voice it finds you wherever you pick the script up. The recovery controls behind that, dragging to look around and tapping a word among them, are set out on the voice teleprompter page.

Getting a long script onto the phone

Long scripts are not written on a phone. Import brings in TXT, Markdown, PDF, DOCX and RTF, part of Pro; the free tier is 6 prompter takes with every prompter feature and no limit on scripts. Pro removes the take limit and adds the import, as a monthly or yearly subscription or a one-off purchase.