How to use a teleprompter app on your Mac

Why the Mac is the right machine for this

A phone teleprompter puts your script below the lens, so you read downwards and the audience sees it. A Mac gives you a large display you can position directly behind or beside the camera, a full keyboard for editing the script seconds before a take, and enough processing headroom to record and prompt at the same time without dropping frames.

It also solves the problem that kills most self-shot video: rewriting. When the script lives on the same machine you are recording on, you fix the line that is not working and go again, instead of re-exporting from another device.

Set the scroll speed to your actual reading pace

The most common mistake is setting a speed and then racing to keep up with it. Work the other way round: read a paragraph at the pace you want on camera, time it, and set the prompter to match.

1. Paste or import your script. Telepromptme takes PDF, RTF and TXT, so a script written anywhere lands ready to read.
2. Set the font size first, not the speed. Bigger text means fewer words on screen, which means a calmer eye line.
3. Use timer scrolling if the piece has to land in an exact duration, and speed scrolling if it does not.
4. Do one read-through without recording. If you are pushing to keep up, slow it down rather than reading faster.

A script that reads well aloud is shorter than one that reads well on a page. Cut roughly a fifth before you time it.

Fix the eye line: mirroring and beam-splitter rigs

A beam-splitter rig puts a half-silvered piece of glass at 45 degrees in front of the lens. Your script reflects off it towards you, the camera sees straight through it, and you read while looking directly down the barrel. Because the text is reflected, it has to be mirrored before it hits the glass, or you read it backwards.

On macOS this is a display setting, not a hardware one. Mirror the text horizontally for a standard rig, or vertically for an overhead setup, then send a duplicate scrolling window to the external display feeding the rig while you keep the controls on your main screen.

• Horizontal mirror for a conventional beam splitter sitting in front of the lens.
• Vertical mirror for rigs that bounce the script off an overhead surface.
• Duplicate window so the rig gets a clean, full-screen scroll while you keep speed and pause controls on the Mac.

If you have no rig at all, the cheap version still works: put the prompter window at the very top of the display, directly under the webcam, and sit further back than feels natural. Distance shrinks the angle between the lens and the text, and the angle is what the audience notices.

Reading over Zoom, Teams and Meet

Live calls are the case where a separate prompter app usually falls apart, because the script either covers the call or sits on a second screen you have to look away to read. A transparent, always-on-top window solves it: the script floats over the meeting window, and you read it while looking at roughly the same place your camera is.

Keep the window narrow and put it immediately below the webcam. On a call, nobody minds a slight downward glance, but a sideways one reads as distraction.

Recording and getting the file out

Prompting and recording in one app removes an entire class of sync problem. You get one file, the take is framed the way you read it, and captions can be generated from the script you already wrote rather than transcribed afterwards.

A short pre-take checklist

• Script timed at your real speaking pace, not your reading pace.
• Font large enough that you are reading two or three words per glance.
• Prompter window as close to the lens as the setup allows.
• Text mirrored if, and only if, it is bouncing off glass.
• One full rehearsal take before the one you intend to keep.