Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
HAVE YOU EVER
tried looking into a camera and delivering a presentation to it? It's not
easy. he eye movement has to be totally diferent from giving a live talk to an audience.
With a large audience you can make eye contact with many people around the room to show
that you are addressing them all, but on camera this is diferent. If you try the same trick, it
looks quite creepy, with your eyes swiveling about all over the place. With a camera you have
to keep your eyes still and look straight into it. Also, you might have to repeat a piece of your
presentation to the camera, so you want to be consistent. his was the problem faced by
early TV shows - getting newsreaders and actors to learn their lines at a much higher rate
than they did back in the theater. he solution they came up with in the 50s was the
tele-
prompter
- or
autocue,
depending on what side of the Atlantic you live.
Early Teleprompters
In 1950, there were paper versions of an auto prompter devised by Hubert Schlaly. He
used a paper roll of cues, or prompts, that were placed next to the camera. he technique of
using a through-the-lens system was irst devised by Jess Oppenheimer three years later.
Jess was a writer, producer and director on the TV show
I Love Lucy,
popular worldwide, and
it quickly gained popularity with newsreaders, soap actors and sitcom comedians. he
English comedian Tony Hancock was one of the irst in the U.K. to discover the system. After
a night of heavy drinking, a fall gave him a concussion that made it impossible to learn his
lines. He used an autocue, or as he called it an
idiot's board,
and never learned a line again.
Sadly, this led to a demise in his performances, even heavier drinking sessions and eventual
suicide. his is a problem I don't think is attached to this project.
he irst teleprompter used rolls of paper with the words handwritten on them. hey would
be wound by hand and put to one side of the lens. hen the strip was placed in front of a
closed-circuit TV camera; a monitor and diagonal piece of glass was used, allowing the cam-
era to shoot straight through the glass without seeing the words. his enabled the actor to
read the words relected in the glass while looking directly into the camera. he monitor was
modiied to give a compensating mirror image so the relection looked the right way around.
his trick relied on the fact that whenever light passes through glass not all of it gets through;
a small amount is relected from the surface. his is known as the
relective loss
of the glass
and is normally about 4%.
With the advent of personal computers in the early 80s, teleprompters entered the digital
age. he irst personal computer to be used for this was the Atari 900 in 1982. It was called
the
Compu=Prompt
and was invented and marketed by Courtney M. Goodin and Laurence B.
Abrams, who continued selling systems for 28 years.
