IT on television: a little about the prompters

Good day.

Surely, many of the readers of Habr, besides reading news feeds and thematic blogs, at least sometimes, but watch the news on TV. Those who are still watching, noticed how confidently and naturally speakers announce the text on the camera, without thinking at all and not looking at the cribs. Well, it is definitely not a secret to anyone that the specialized “prompters” - teleprompters - help them in this.
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Due to the specifics of the work, the author of this opus just ran into one of these devices. Hot on the heels of this topic appeared.

So, about the device. By the will of fate, the teleprompter made by the American company Autoscript came to our studio.

Structurally, the device consists of two parts: a mirror nozzle on the camera and a control board.

Hardware

A special chassis is mounted on the tripod, on which the display and the mirror are fixed. The mirror on the back side is transparent. Behind it is a camera lens. In general, even without reading the manual (and it was not in our kit), it is not difficult to assemble such a design. But still tinker happened.

The whole thing gets a composite video signal from the control computer. In our case, a PCI control and output card was installed on the computer. The card has composite video outputs and a COM port for the controller.



The controller allows you to change the direction and speed of movement of the text on the breather, jump over sections of text, etc. He hides in the speaker's desk, allowing him to change the display parameters unnoticed.

Software

The proprietary software is called WinPlus. And the interesting things started right away with him - by entering the serial number. The fact is that in the input window, the cursor is exactly in the middle and does not allow, neither to enter, nor to copy the code there. This seemingly trivial took a little time, until they thought of allocating an empty space in front of the cursor and entering a serial number.

WinPlus itself meets the user interface, a la windows 95, in which “more than 9000” menu items, buttons and settings. In all this splendor there are 2 main windows - Script, and Run Order. The script window understands drag-end-drop documents Word, RTF, and text files.



The text of the script is divided into Slugline. These are headings between which navigation is possible including through the controller. Each slugline has its own unique number that determines the position of a given piece of text in the Run Order list. For each entry, depending on the amount of text, is determined by the duration of the show.

In turn, the script text can be formatted: change the font (we have arial and times new roman in the list), font and underlay color, insert bullets, and so on.

There are tools to quickly hide both individual words and lines, as well as entire sections. It is possible to output to the prompter the current time, timer and additional information for the announcer.

There is also a functionality for receiving operational messages from the newsroom. But, to tell the truth, these functions are not included in our license.

Conclusion

After a short use of the system, the impression was that the software was slightly functionally overloaded. Moreover, all this is tied to an outdated interface with its own icons. In principle, additional features and functions make sense, but there is a suspicion that during normal operation they will not be used. How it will definitely show practice, but it is not far off.

These are the impressions. Thanks for attention.

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Copyright of the first photo - autoscript.