IT on television: a little about prompters

Good afternoon.

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 still watch, noticed how confidently and naturally the announcers pronounce the text on the camera, completely without hesitation and without looking into the cheat sheets. Well, it’s definitely no secret that the specialized “tips” - teleprompters help them in this.

Due to the specifics of the work, the author of this opus just ran into one of these devices. In hot pursuit, this topic appeared.

So, about the device. By the will of fate, I got at the disposal of our studio a teleprompter manufactured by the American company Autoscript.

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

Hardware

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

All this business receives 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 the text on the prompter, jump over sections of the text, etc. He hides in the speaker’s desk, allowing him to discreetly change the display settings.

Software

The proprietary software is called WinPlus. And the fun began with him right away - with the introduction of the serial number. The fact is that in the input window, the cursor is exactly in the middle and does not allow you to enter or copy-paste the code there. This, it would seem, a trifle took a little time, until they thought of allocating an empty space in front of the cursor and entering the serial.

WinPlus itself meets the user with the interface, a la Windows 95, in which there are “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-and-drop documents of Word, RTF, and text files.



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

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

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

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

Conclusion

After a short use of the system, it seemed 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 they will not be used during normal operation. How exactly it will be shown by practice, but it is not far off.

These are the impressions. Thanks for attention.

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