A teleprompter that scrolls at your actual pace.

most free teleprompters give you a speed dial numbered one to ten. the trouble is that the same number scrolls a different pace for every script, because it moves pixels, and how many words sit in a pixel depends on your font size, your text width and how long your sentences are. you end up rehearsing against a setting that means nothing anywhere else.

this one measures the rendered height of your script, divides by the number of words in it, and scrolls at whatever pixel speed delivers the words per minute you asked for. so 130 is 130 whether the text is small and wide or huge and narrow, and if you change the size while you are reading, the pace holds.

that also makes the runtime honest. the setup screen tells you how long the script will take before you record, which is the number that decides whether a 60 second ad script is actually a 60 second ad script.

one more thing that sounds technical and is not. the scroll here is driven by the clock, not by how many frames your laptop happens to be drawing. prompters that move a fixed number of pixels per frame run faster on a fast machine and slow down on a tired one, which is why people report a script speeding up the moment they plug the charger in. this one works out the distance from elapsed time, so the pace holds on battery, on mains, and on a phone.

start at 130 words per minute and adjust from there. toastmasters puts the effective range for a speech at 120 to 160. audiobooks are recorded to Audible's ACX standard of 9,300 words per finished hour, which works out at 155. ordinary conversation runs about 150, and past 180 you sound like you are being chased. slower than 110 reads as a hostage video unless you are deliberately building weight.

the mistake almost everyone makes is speeding the prompter up until it matches how fast they are reading. do it the other way around: set the pace you want to sound like, then practise into it. the prompter is a metronome, not a race. if you keep falling behind, the script is too dense rather than the speed too slow, and cutting whole sentences fixes it faster than any setting.

everything you need mid-take, so you never have to hunt for a button while the camera rolls.

• space, start and pause. tapping the script does the same thing, which is the one to use on a phone.
• up and down, speed by 5 words per minute at a time.
• left and right, text size. the pace stays true when the size changes.
• M, mirror the text for a beam splitter rig.
• F, fullscreen. R, back to the top. escape, leave the prompter.

the progress bar at the bottom is also a scrubber: drag it to jump back to the paragraph you fluffed, without restarting the whole script or losing your speed.

put the prompter as close to the lens as you can. every inch between the text and the lens shows up as your eyes drifting off centre. on a laptop that means the browser window at the very top of the screen, with the camera directly above it, which is what the eye line marker is for: park your gaze on that line and the camera sees you looking at it.

write for the mouth, not the page. short lines, contractions, one idea per sentence. i test 150 or more creatives a month and the scripted ones that beat the improvised ones are always the ones written the way the person actually talks. if a sentence needs a comma to survive, it will not survive being read aloud.

the other trick is to record the first take knowing you will throw it away. it loosens the read, and the second take is almost always the one that ships. if the script itself is the problem, the word counter gives you the same runtime maths before you start, and the UGC playbook covers what makes a talking-head video work once you are past reading it cleanly.