I recently bought the Elgato Prompter
and it has been such an awesome tool that it prompted me to make this video. Honestly, the last time I added something
this game changing to my setup was probably the ATEM Mini several years ago. And that's because the ATEM took multi
input video switching, something that had always been expensive and confusing,
and made it simple and affordable. The Elgato Prompter does
that exact same thing. Traditionally, teleprompters
have always been either expensive or clunky and confusing. And in a lot of cases, all
of those things all at once. But now for under $300, you get an
awesome tool that actually works. And this video is not sponsored. It is going to sound like it's
sponsored, because I'm going to say so many nice things about this Prompter. It is not. I bought this as soon as they announced
it because I was super excited about it, and then I've had it for a
while now, and I've been using it a lot, and I've been loving it a lot. But before diving into the specifics
of this Prompter, I should promptly explain what the point of even having
a teleprompter is in the first place. First and foremost, prompters are
obviously great for reading scripts, whether it's word for word or just a
list of bullet points that you cycle through, and let me tell you, after
using this for a while, since I'm holding it right now, I'm not using
it right now, and I really miss it! Not because I do everything word for
word scripts, but just having bullet points to keep me on track and to keep
videos relatively, not insanely long, this has been a really wonderful tool
that I wish I could be using right now. But beyond scripts and outlines,
prompters are useful for so many other things, especially in today's world,
where video conferencing and remote work are becoming more and more popular. Being able to put a video call on
the Prompter screen and then look directly at the person that you're
on the call with is really amazing. And I didn't realize how much I
was missing over all these years by having the person slightly off
to the side of my camera over time. I've trained myself to always look at
the camera's lens, but that means when I'm on a video call I'm, never really
looking at the person because I just I feel disconnected when it's just me
looking off to the side of the screen. So I'm always looking here at the
lens kind of missing out on the call. Using the Prompter and being able to
actually stare at a person or people when I'm talking to them has really totally
changed how I feel about remote work and video conferencing and video calls. And beyond that, a prompter is also
a great tool to have while you're recording because it can be used as
a reference monitor to make sure your framing and your focus are good, to
make sure you're actually recording so you don't do that thing where you press
the button to stop recording and then the camera starts recording because
it wasn't recording the whole time. That's never fun. So just being able to see that everything
is up and running properly while recording has been awesome peace of mind that the
Prompter has also brought to my setup. And from there, there are a
million other uses for prompters. So suffice it to say if you're somebody
who produces a lot of videos, spends a lot of time in virtual meetings
or does any sort of online teaching and presenting, a prompter will
really make your life so much easier. But up until now, I've been pretty
hesitant to talk too much about teleprompters because they're just kind
of a nightmare to deal with, usually. I've used all kinds of teleprompters
over the years, from my first job working at a local TV station back
in 2001, to setting up different broadcast studios at different schools,
and building my own home setup. And let me tell you, even the best
prompters up to this point are always pretty much kind of a pain to use. Prior to this video I made a video several
years ago about a GlideGear prompter that's basically just a big hunk of metal
and glass that you put a smartphone or a tablet or another display in and that is
what I had been using in my home setup well, really up until now. But even that became impractical to
use all the time because of its size and the fact that you had to wrangle in
figuring out a screen and software, and because you're looking into a mirrored
surface, you have to figure out a way to mirror the image on the display
so that way everything's not just backwards when you're looking at it, and that is not something that has
traditionally been very easy to do. And so it just means that I
don't find myself using the teleprompter- an incredibly useful
tool, as often as I'd like to. And because of all that, that's why
I think that the Elgato Prompter is genuinely a groundbreaking tool for
anybody who does this sort of thing. Not only is it affordable, but it solves
literally all of those Prompter problems. Promptblems? First off, its physical design is small
and lightweight and it can accommodate virtually any camera because it comes
with basically everything you need to adapt pretty much any camera, all the
way from a little webcam up to a full on cinema camera to the Elgato Prompter. If you have the Elgato FaceCam, of
course, it comes with a FaceCam plate that goes right on the back of the
Prompter and then you're all set there. But if you're using a more traditional
camera that you just want to put up to the back of the Prompter, you have
this sort of universal lens plate, which then has a shroud to prevent
light from reaching the camera. Keeps it shrouded in secrecy. But then you also get this
booklet of step up rings for pretty much every lens diameter. And so what this does is,
for example, this is a 67mm. I can put this on this lens. And now I just put this plate on the back
of the Prompter, and then the Prompter just goes right on the camera's lens. And lens me tell you, I was really
nervous about this because having a big thing hanging off the front of my
camera, um, seems weird and kind of risky. But I've been using this since the
Prompter's release with no issues. Now of course it might depend on
your lens and your camera, but for my Sony mirrorless cameras with
all my E Mount lenses, it's had no problem, you know, putting any undue
pressure on the lens or the mount. I mean, it's light enough I can
just walk around like this with a prompter, which would be ridiculous. And if I don't want to have it hang
off the camera, it does come with this back plate here that screws into the
Prompter like so, and then you have this platform here that you can raise and
lower and you would mount your camera just on the platform, and then
have it peek through the Prompter. And then down here on the bottom,
you have two 1/4 20 mounts. One on the display itself, and one
sort of on this other platform here. And that's what you can
mount to your tripod. So in that case, the Prompter
mounts to your tripod, and then your camera just sits on this
platform right here behind it. And you do have these two
accessory shoes up here. They're pretty lightweight and
plasticky, but they could be good for mounting small lights. Maybe a small other monitor if you
needed another monitor or something. It's nice to have them. I'm glad they're there. So this display, which then just becomes
another external display for your computer that you can drag things to and
from, I don't think the resolution is even 4k, but I was honestly surprised
at how good it looks ,and straight out of the box the display is reversed. So that means as soon as you start
looking at things in this mirrored section, everything is correct. If I put some text up on screen,
you can see on the display itself, the text is backwards. But if you look through the mirrored
part here, you can see that it actually is correct and easy to read. And you don't have to do
anything to make that happen. That's just how the Prompter
works straight out of the box. I've heard some people say that they
wish the display was bigger, which could be cool, especially if you use
this mostly as a monitor or for video calls, but I honestly think that this
is kind of the perfect size because the Prompter is not designed to be
in a studio 15 feet away from you. It's designed to be relatively close,
which means this is big enough to be usable, but it's small enough to
easily fit in your setup, hopefully without you having to move and change
a whole bunch of different stuff. Plus, having a slightly smaller
display on a prompter can oftentimes be helpful because if this screen were
huge and I was reading a script, it'd be much easier to see my eyes going
back and forth across the display. Whereas this is just the right size, and
of course you can adjust the margins and everything to reduce your margin of error,
but it's just the right size where even if I'm looking left to right or looking
anywhere on the display, you can't really notice my eyes moving pretty much at all. Now of course, reading from a
prompter is a skill that you need to practice to look natural, but it's
not too terribly difficult to do. And as I've been editing videos
that I've made with the Prompter, while I'm editing them, I totally
forgot that I was even using it. Like, it is that unnoticeable
that even I didn't notice it, and I was the one who did it! And another huge benefit of this little
prompter is that setup is super simple. As you might have noticed,
it's just one cable. It comes with a super high speed
speed, five gigabytes per second, a super high speed USB C to USB A cable. There's no separate power. There's no separate display thing. It's just one cable for both power
and data information display. And this is something else really cool. This does not count technically as
another external display on your computer. This uses something called DisplayLink,
which I don't fully understand so I'm just going to say that it is magic. And what that means is that somehow it is
being run into your computer differently than a typical external display. So if you're working with a computer
that has a limited number of external displays that it can support, or
you've already maxed out your number of external displays, you can still
use the Prompter because it's not going to count as an external display, but it works just the same as one. You can drag stuff to it, you can playback
video on it, there's no lag, no weird latency issues or anything like that. It works exactly the
same as a native display. But again, it's just magic. And finally, the last piece of the
puzzle that helps this prompter solve all those problems- that's a lot
of alliteration- is the software. If you've ever used a Stream Deck or
pretty much any Elgato thing, you know that they're really good at making stuff
simple, even complicated things simple. And the Camera Hub
software is exactly that. It's super easy to understand. You can even adjust your camera
settings there, and that's also what you can open up to then dive
into the Prompter specific settings. But you don't even have to have that
open when you're using the Prompter because you can, if you want, just
drag things right to the display, just like you would with any other display. I really liked the software though,
because it is super simple and pretty powerful and it lets you use
the Prompter either for scripts, as a confidence monitor, or as
a really cool combination of the two, where you can see your script
over like your monitor of yourself. So you can kind of see
both things at once. Or if you're doing a live stream,
you can put your chat over the image of the live stream. It's a ton of flexibility. I haven't seen that
functionality ever before so it is really cool. Now I've been using the Elgato Prompter
with my Sony FX3, and that has been great. Because of the way I have my camera
mounted on a big tripod head with also my microphone boom arm coming out of
the side, the Prompter did not fit when I tried to put it like this because my
mic boom arm was getting in the way. I have a very strange setup though,
so I don't think that'll be a problem on most other setups if you don't
want to hang the Prompter off the lens of your camera and you want to
mount the camera to the back of it. But I've had no issues just putting this
right on the lens of my camera here. We can even see like right now. It's not there and now the Prompter
is on my camera That is how quick it is to install and remove the Prompter
And if I want to take it off, I just reach over here and take it off. This setup has worked great, especially
because I do take this camera off the tripod a lot So it's been pretty
easy, just pop the Prompter off, pop the camera off, and I'm good to go. Now yet another thing that is really cool
about this prompter is, while you can control it with a mouse and keyboard,
even just using your script, you can just scroll your mouse through the script. You can also then control it with
something like an Elgato Stream Deck, or what's extremely cool is the Elgato Pedal. This is one of my favorite,
like, underrated things. This pedal's amazing. So what I've been doing, since the Elgato
Pedal is basically just a three button Stream Deck, when I have a script up
on the Prompter, just to keep myself in the zone so I'm not reaching around and
sort of getting distracted a lot, I have the middle button of the pedal set to
start and stop playback of the script if I wanted the script
to just Keep rolling. And of course you can adjust
the speed on that as well. And then I have the left and right buttons
set to just move the script up and down. And so a lot of times I just sort of put
some text on screen, go through those bullet points, and then I just stomp
the pedal to move it to the next section of bullet points, go through those
bullet points, and so on and so forth. But being able to control the
Prompter with the pedal at my feet, normally in like a TV station you
would have to have the prompter and then a separate person that used
to be my job when I was an intern. was to control the prompter, or you have
to deal with this janky software that sometimes just doesn't work or doesn't
go at the right speed or fumble with another controller or something and this
is just hands free, I can do everything just with my feet and control my script. And that is, it is a feet
of prompting technology. So all that being said, are
there any cons to the Prompter? Is there anything that I
don't like about the Prompter? Honestly, not really. I con't think of any cons. Compared to, honestly, every
other prompter I've ever used, this one is basically perfect. There are definitely a few areas
where the software could be improved, like more robust script editing
so you can do multiple scripts at once a little more easily. Or I would love the ability to easily
adjust the screen's color temperature. I tried calibrating the screen and
it was a little funky and so the color temperature of this display-
I know it's not a color accurate reference monitor, but it doesn't
exactly match my other one which throws my eyes off just a little bit. So just having a little slider to make
it, you know, a little warmer or a little cooler would be a little cooler. My other software gripe if you could
call it that which again This is Version 1.0 of this software, it's sometimes
it can be a little funky if you like unplug the Prompter and plug it back in. Sometimes then the software
won't control the Prompter. I have found that in those cases if I just
unplug the Prompter, close the software, plug the Prompter back in, open the
software, then everything works again. So it gets a little weird if
you're like disconnecting it in the middle, but that's, that's
a pretty minor issue overall. The glass of the Prompter doesn't really
affect image quality or clarity, but as you can kind of see here, it does
sort of make things slightly darker. It messes with the
exposure just a little bit. If you look right here, it's nothing
too crazy, and this room is also very, very bright, and that's an easy
thing to fix either in your camera settings, or in your editing software,
or even in your Elgato camera hub app or something like Ecamm or OBS. There's like a million
ways to solve that problem. So a slightly darker image, not really an issue. Fortunately, it doesn't have any effect
on clarity or sharpness or any of those other really important things that
you don't want to mess with when it comes to your camera's image quality. Now the biggest potential issue,
I think, is glare from the screen because the screen is so bright. If you have it at like full
brightness on something that has a light background, you can sometimes
notice a little bit of haze or glare. It's almost like it's the reflection
of the screen on the mirror sort of, you can kind of tell, and you can kind
of see that in the camera's image. This is not really, I don't
think, a defect of the prompter. I would rather have a screen that is
too bright that I need to turn down rather than a screen that is too dim
and that's what I have to live with. I think the easiest way around that
is to just make sure that your screen isn't crazy bright and make sure that
you're using a dark background because that eliminates the problem totally. It's really only super bright
white background then you might have a little bit of problem
with sort of haze and glare. Otherwise just stick to a dark
background and you're good to go. That glare issue is something that
can happen with any prompter so it's just something to be aware of it's
not a defect or an issue with this prompter, it's just that's that's it. That's being super nitpicky. Those are the "bad" things I
have found about the Prompter. Ultimately, my gauge when it
comes to things like this is how easy they are to recommend. Sometimes a thing can be great, but
it requires a lot of extra accessories or fiddling in order to make it
work right, and that can be tough to recommend because I feel like
I'm just giving someone a chore. I'm saying, "Yeah, this thing is great!" And then they get it, and then they
just have to keep troubleshooting before they can actually use the thing. The Elgato Prompter is
literally plug and play. You spend a few minutes
poking around in the software. And then you're good to go. You don't need to buy any other
accessories or download a whole bunch of different software. Just the one little Camera Hub app and the
Prompter is awesome right from the start. And speaking of things that are awesome
from the start, thank you to everyone who helps support my channel through
Patreon and YouTube channel memberships.
