Enhance Your Video Production with the Elgato Prompter

Dave Jackson [00:00:00]:
If you've been thinking about getting into video, today, we're gonna talk about a teleprompter that's more than a teleprompter, more than a cheap one, but it eliminates a ton of headaches. Welcome to Podcasting Resources, helping you find the tools to enable you to impact your audience faster, smarter, and deeper. Our website, podcastingresources.com. Hey. Welcome to Podcasting Resources. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com. And today, I'm talking about something that just showed up for me as I for this. It's December 20th. Christmas has come early to me, and I have an Elgato prompter. Now I also have in my closet some little, like, $50 teleprompter. And the problem with most prompters, I saw one out is on. It's in Neewer or whatever that company is, and it was, like, $169. The one I'm talking about today is $280. That is not a small chunk of change. But in regards to teleprompters, it kinda is. These things can get very expensive. Now this is a 9 inch prompter. Now here's the thing that sets it way apart than the rest. It comes with a built in video screen. Almost all the cheaper ones, and there's nothing wrong with these, but you either have to put an iPad on it, a, you know, some sort of phone with it, some sort of screen. Basically, what it is, it's a little table with a mirror, and then you provide the video for it, whether that's your phone or your tablet, and then you kind of somehow have to figure out how the you're gonna get the text to scroll and things of that nature. And so they're a little bit of a headache. And so what Elgato did was they rolled out a you know, in this case, it's not a teleprompter. They're just calling it prompter, and it comes with a screen. So there's none of this, oh, I have to tie my phone into it, and that's weird because all my notes are on my phone and just all the hassles. It comes with a screen and then the glass that looks through to your camera, and it comes with software. Now You can use whatever software, and this is, again, one of the things that makes it way different is when you're not recording video, This thing is a little baby 9 inch monitor, and so I'm using it on my left hand side. I have of a Mac mini. On my right hand side, I have an old Dell, and I use a tool called Synergy so I can share a keyboard and mouse with it. And on my Mac, which is where I'm primarily doing this, I have set the Elgato as an extended display. So it's like I have 3 displays now. It's pretty handy. So what you can do with this now is it's not just about making YouTube videos. It's when you are doing interviews, you can let's say you're being interviewed on SquadCast. You can put the Elgato into the display mode, so it's not putting any text over your screen, and then you can look directly at the person that you're being interviewed. Or if you're on a Zoom call or anything like that, that myself. I'm like, that's pretty cool. And then when you are doing videos, you can plug your face cam camera into it. If you have a DSLR camera, there are all sorts of different kind of adapters that you can put on this. So it'll pretty much fit any kind of video, and then you can basically use the prompter for a prompter, or you can do both. I just made a video where I could see myself, but I had the video on top of me so I could see how I looked. And things like that come in handy because I noticed my autofocus was turned on, and it kept making that weird thing where it kinda zooms in and out. So I was able to see that. So it's a pretty handy tool. And if you're gonna be doing videos, This might be something you really look into. Now that's the good news. I'm gonna be using it not so much to read a script, but just to have bullet points that I can kinda go through. The bad news is I ordered this in November. It was back ordered, and I got it in December. And what I'm hearing now is if you order 1 today, it may be back ordered until April. That's gonna depend on where you live. But I just wanted to share this with you because as a resource, the headache of wait. I've gotta find a 2nd phone or my iPad or some sort of tablet to put on the thing, and then I got a skirt. This eliminates all that. So, yes, it's a little more expensive than some of the kind of consumer versions of teleprompters, but it eliminates a lot of headaches. I'll have links in the episode description. So even though it's back ordered now as I record this, it might not be back ordered when you're listening to this.