Latest from Tv Technology in Teleprompter

KAKE Selects CueScript Teleprompters for New Studio

Bob@lockwoodbroadcast.com (Bob Pectelidis) — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 15:17:36 +0000

WICHITA, Kan.–ABC affiliate KAKE Television, owned by Lockwood Broadcast Group, went on-air in 1954 from a facility here in Wichita, Kan. The station serves as the flagship of KAKEland Television Network (KTN) which comprises eight stations that relay ABC shows and other programming provided by KAKE. Central to our success is our popular locally produced newscasts that reach homes across central and western Kansas and stretch as far as counties in Colorado and Oklahoma.

This year marks a milestone for KAKE as we celebrate our 70th anniversary by launching a totally redesigned state-of-the-art studio. We wanted only the very latest cutting-edge technology to provide our viewers with a superior visual experience. The project included an updated camera system, new LED lighting and an advanced motion graphics package. We also knew that this major upgrade had to include the very latest and most reliable teleprompter technology available.

New Studio, New Tech
As corporate chief engineer of the Lockwood Broadcast Television Stations Group, I oversee growth initiatives for the group and am involved in all technical operations. As such, I was determined that each equipment choice represented the latest technologies, met our requirements, and was interoperable.

I was introduced to CueScript at several industry events and came to know the company as a forward-thinking organization. Michael Accardi, CueScript’s founder and president, was a terrific ambassador for the brand, always available and always paying close attention to our requirements and priorities. I knew both support and performance would be top notch.

IP-Based Teleprompters
We installed six IP-based CueScript teleprompters which are a combination of the hardware framework, and the software that run the scripts. We use Juniper switchers in the studio that are connected by fiber to our Juniper core IP infrastructure. Connectivity is only as good as the network and using IP connectivity made setup fast and easy.

The actual installation was also a breeze and very intuitive. KAKE Chief Engineer Mark Jenkins— who was on set daily—said the process was effortless and the smoothest part of the installation. The prompters pointed at our MOS system, connected, and started pulling scripts immediately. We didn’t need any real training either, just a short remote session and we were up and running.

CueScript prompters offer a choice of handheld remotes or very sturdy foot pedals. So far, our talent seems to prefer the remotes, but it’s nice to have the choice. Looking forward, if we have a need to increase our prompter family, I will call CueScript.

More information is available at www.cuescript.tv/

The Art of ‘Iprompting’

Kevin Hilton — Thu, 06 May 2021 12:14:07 +0000

LONDON—The teleprompter has long been a mainstay of live television, replacing the earlier and unkindly named “idiot board,” but still ensuring that on-air presenters get their lines right. Its necessary usefulness moved beyond TV into live events such as political conferences, corporate presentations and product launches.

Their ubiquity and effectiveness now extend into the realm of independent and individual internet broadcasters, to the extent that there are regularly videos on YouTube selecting the best teleprompters for YouTube.

SMALL AND PORTABLE

By its very nature, this end of the market is serviced primarily by systems in the $80–$1,400 price bracket but over the past year the higher-end manufacturers have been looking more closely at how their technology can be used both at and from home, for traditional broadcasters rather than YouTubers.

“We have seen an increase in the need to use smaller, more portable displays for prompter text, especially when home working,” said Robin Brown, product manager of Autoscript (part of the Vitec group with Autocue). “These screens are mostly tablet-sized and the ability to connect an iPad into the system as a prompter, without any added latency from streaming video, has been significant for many of our customers.”

Brown explains that “network coverage and simplicity of configuration” have made this way of working easily adoptable and simple to apply. The mass uptake of remote workflows was necessitated by the pandemic of the past year but has been enabled by the continuing evolution of connectivity technologies. “The speed of change in IP development and deployment—plus the global pandemic—has dramatically changed what users expect of prompting and what it can deliver,” said Brown. “Remote operations have become commonplace for users to request this mode of working, which is making for a buoyant market.”

Covid-19 has affected every person and every business, forcing media enterprises to find more ways to connect to small devices at remote locations, according to Chris O’Brien, president of Telescript International. The understanding and popularity of teleprompting has increased considerably, O’Brien says, with greater demand for these units not just in the home but new and established studios as well.

“The need for ‘smarter’ IP-based solutions is extremely important, which is why Telescript is partnering with a global technology company to add their IP into our monitors,” he said, adding that the details of this partnership will be announced this month.

FEWER PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES

A practical downside to the shift towards more compact devices is emerging technology meeting the limitations of human faculties.

“Everyone wants smaller but the problem is that the talents’ eyes are not getting any better,” said Michael Accardi, president of CueScript. “Small consumer-based products fall short on readability, connectivity and dependability. Now more than ever, people are depending on prompters to get the message out the first time and we have been designing systems that meet the customers’ needs. There is no room for error.”

In general, Accardi observes, the prompting market is scrambling to cope with the new normal. The reaction to Covid-19—with more home and remote working—has brought about new styles of broadcast operations, which extend to teleprompters.

“Today, operators and talent can be anywhere—they do not have to be together,” he says. “All physical boundaries have been lifted and it is common for an operator in their home to be prompting for multiple talent in multiple locations.”

One particular Mirror Image customer requested an iPad be mounted on the front of the company’s new LC-12 E camera teleprompter. (Image credit: Mirror Image Teleprompters)

Prompter vendors have been seeing very specific requests from end-users to meet these changing requirements, according to JT Meidl, president of Mirror Image Teleprompters, noting that one particular customer requested an iPad be mounted on the front of the company’s new LC-12 E camera teleprompter.

“The iPad acts as a talent monitor and receives a live network feed, allowing for perfect eye contact,” Meidl said. “The system was installed in the customer’s mobile studio van and has been used since the start of the pandemic by a major network.”

Studio equipment developers have also been looking at how to incorporate prompters into more compact and integrated systems. Robotic camera control specialist Telemetrics developed the Telepod with this in mind.

According to company Vice President Michael Cuomo, Telepod interfaces with “most teleprompting systems and automatically keeps the prompter facing the talent at all times and varying heights.”

Cuomo adds that the Telepod is a response to the trend for fewer personnel in TV studios. It includes the RoboEye 4K pan/tilt camera system, Televator Mini elevating pedestal, floor dolly and RCCP-2A robotic control panel featuring reFrame AI software. “Hands -free prompting will soon be used for all newscasts, going the way of the three camera setup of robotic camera that is now operated by one person in the control room,” he said.

INTEGRATION WITH THIRD PARTIES

Overall integration is the ongoing trend in broadcasting with Telescript’s Chris O’Brien adding that customers are increasingly looking for integrated IP prompting systems that work with the main newsroom technologies from the likes of ENPS, Avid iNews and Octopus while at the same time supporting SDI facilities.

“With many studios, colleges and TV professionals turning to IP solutions, teleprompting displays that natively connect to IP environments make adding prompting to a network easy,” he said. “The future is smarter, smaller, sleeker, with the emphasis on smarter systems that can interconnect through IP networks.”

Autoscript, a pioneer of IP workflows for telepromting, says its “Intelligent Prompting” system, which is fully-IP enabled, will similarly change how people use teleprompters.

“Our primary focus is building responsive technologies that enable broadcasters to work more flexibly and manage resources more efficiently,” Brown said. “Ensuring presenters always remain confidently on script is our goal because that’s the ultimate test of any prompting system.”

Accardi agrees that IP-based prompting “is not the future, it is today,” adding that the demand for flexibility, speed and dependability is driving development. He also does not see the new workflows developed for remote production will go away.

“This adoption of remote prompting will only expand, changing the way we do sports, location shoots, satellite studios and more,” he said. “Customers now understand how to leverage their existing systems and in turn we will see prompters in more places than ever before.”

KEEPING THOSE SCRIPTS ROLLING: Fail-Safe Teleprompting Enhanced in the IP Age

Robin Brown — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 17:48:43 +0000

As the IP revolution continues to transform media and broadcast and deliver greater efficiencies and flexibility, prompting will be a key beneficiary, especially when it comes to smooth, instant failover in the event of an equipment glitch. In this article, we’ll look at the impact of IP networks on prompting redundancy and reliability.

Teleprompting is the unsung hero in the broadcast chain – a critical essential, to be sure, but one that’s often taken for granted until it doesn’t work. As one of our customers said once, “Prompting is one of the last things that broadcasters think of, but it’s the first thing that’s missed when it doesn’t operate properly.”

Room for improvement

To appreciate what’s at stake with prompting reliability, consider the talent’s position. For a news anchor or other media personality, there are fewer worse nightmares than a prompter that stops working on air and a script that disappears mid-read. Pre-IP, getting things going again has been primarily a manual and delay-filled process often requiring engineering intervention.

Traditional prompting systems rely on USB, serial, or video cables to connect the controllers to a local prompting engine and video connections to deliver the prompting output to a traditional on-camera teleprompter monitor. For critical live productions, even the most resilient of these systems requires a second, completely redundant computer and video generation unit running all of the same settings as the main unit, such as the presenter’s choice of font sizes, background colours, newsroom connections, loaded rundowns, or controller profiles. In the event of a problem on the main prompting computer, an operator has to manually fail over to the second box using an A/B switch.

Primary Application

Since the two systems aren’t automatically synchronised, the operator has to manually locate the correct place in the script on the redundant system. Controllers also have to be duplicated or separately switched with a second A/B switch, and the switchover of the video causes the prompting monitors to lose their input and cycle for a signal, creating further delay. In the meantime, the talent is forced to improvise while enduring second after appalling second of missing script.

IP networks: built-in redundancy

In contrast, an IP-based prompting workflow creates connectivity without requiring point-to-point connections, and therefore delivers core redundancy. At the prompting application level, this enables a full-redundancy fail-safe by which a mirrored PC, paired with the main application, can seamlessly take over if the first PC/application fails — with automatic synchronization of script position, individual users’ settings, controllers, newsroom connections, teleprompters, etc. When the first application recovers, it drops into standby mode, at the ready should the active PC fail.

Mirror application automatically synchronizes with the primary application to provide seamless fail-safe

Since all elements of the prompting system are networked devices and therefore not physically connected to each other, the existing controller(s) can continue working with prompts from the backup machine, wherever it is in the world. Because the switch from the host PC to the backup is immediate, the on-air talent might notice nothing more than a fractional, millisecond pause in the scroll speed – if he or she notices anything at all.

A critical element: data-only transport

Delivering and displaying the video script on the prompting monitors is another area that is vastly improved in an IP-based workflow. Traditional prompting systems send a full video feed to the monitor via a video cable; likewise, some approaches to IP prompting send the full video signal over the network. While video over IP might work well for many other types of IP media deployments, it’s not ideal for prompting because of bandwidth issues (requiring compression, encoding and decoding) and the potential for latency and synchronisation problems.

A better approach – and one more conducive to reliability – is for the prompting software to send small unicast data packets instead of the full video feed. With only small amounts of data sent over the IP network, every monitor can remain in constant communication with the master application to ensure reliable synchronisation and centralised management. Rather than all monitors relying on a single video stream from a video generator – a single point of failure – each monitor on the network renders its own script video. The prompt operator can see at a glance the status of all devices, be they scroll controllers or on camera monitors, and so can tell immediately if there is any issue.

Building redundancy into an IP-based prompting network

So what are the vital elements of an IP prompting system that delivers these levels of reliability? First and foremost, the solution requires software that offers a fully synchronised redundancy system with mirror functionality. (At this writing, WinPlus-IP from Autoscript is the only software to offer these capabilities.) Also critical are prompting monitors with built-in intelligent scroll technology that enables them to generate a script independently, based on the data packets sent over the IP network. All IP-connected devices, including controllers and prompters, need to be able to be seamlessly managed by the device manager of any application on the network.

Autoscript teleprompting in use as this year’s royal wedding in London.

Although creating IP prompting redundancy requires two software applications, the days of having to duplicate hardware for the scroll engine and controllers are over. The benefit of this comes into focus with a prompting workflow that enables broadcast operations to collaborate across geographies and allocate resources cost-effectively. Since the software-based prompting elements are connected on a network rather than running on local hardware, the backup PC could be in a different time zone that isn’t operational. As any operator can prompt to any teleprompter on the network, an operator in New York can control the script, speed, and other prompting attributes of a prompter in London and instantly switch control to an operator in Doha in the event of a resource issue, such as operator illness.

It all comes back to the talent. In the final analysis, the anchor or other on-air personality doesn’t care how the scripts are delivered; he or she just wants to be able to read the text at a comfortable and adjustable pace, with no hiccups or interruptions. For an IP-based teleprompting solution, the right built-in intelligence creates failsafe reliability and a win-win situation: talent is enabled, rather than hindered, by the technology, and the broadcast operation is able to take maximum advantage of IP’s connectivity, flexibility, ease of use, and cost efficiencies.

BigVu Releases Video Prompter App

Michael Balderston — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 11:41:00 +0000

NEW YORK—BigVu is putting a big piece of newsroom gear onto people’s smartphone, announcing the release of a video prompter app for mobile reporting.

Available for both iOS and Android devices, this mobile prompter enables users to capture themselves with their devices as the text scrolls on the screen and adjusts to the reader’s speed.

The BigVu app can also be used as an end-to-end news-authoring collaboration platform. Stories can be accessed by multiple users simultaneously through a shared, cloud-based virtual desk; scripts can be assigned and uploaded to a specific user; and multiple takes can be stored on the app and uploaded to the cloud for distribution. The background can also be changed.

BigVu is offering the app in different packages: Freelancer for a single user; Starter Pro for up to three; Publisher for up to 15; and Enterprise allows for unlimited users.

Autocue Offering QStart Teleprompter Software for Free

Michael Balderston — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:58:00 +0000

LONDON—Autocue is dishing out its QStart teleprompter software to anyone who wants it. The company announced that the Windows/OS QStart software is now available for free to all users, with or without hardware.

QStart is downloadable software that can be used offline. Based on the QMaster software, QStart features multi-language text and menus, and icon-based action buttons. Scripts can be imported from .doc, .rtf, and .txt files. Script makers and assignable hot keys are also available.

To download the free version of QStart, click here.

Autocue is a Vitec Videocom brand.

Autoscript Integrates With Sony ELC

Michael Balderston — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 16:01:00 +0000

LONDON—Vitec Videocom brand Autoscript has announced a collaboration with Sony that will integrate Autoscript’s WinPlus teleprompting software with Sony’s ELC control system.

The ELC is designed to manage newsroom control functions from a dedicated operator position, including video and sound sources, studio cameras and audio, playout servers, DDRs, and graphic devices. With the WinPlus software, the system adds control of script and the prompter rundown. The collaboration will also see Sony ELC launch the correct rundown and start position into WinPlus.

Autoscript is a provider of teleprompting equipment based in London.

CueScript Sets Up Collapsible Hood at CCW

Michael Balderston — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 10:34:00 +0000

FAIRFIELD, CONN.—Professional prompting developer CueScript has announced that it will showcase its new CSHCM Collapsible Hood and CSTM24 24-inch Talent Monitor at CCW 2015.

CSTM24

The CSHCM Collapsible Hood is a full-sized lightweight hood that is able to fold without removing the glass for full protection and quick set up. CueScript launched the hood at IBC 2015.

The company will also have its CSTM24 24-inch Talent Monitor on display. It features a high bright LED screen with integrated mounting rails, low energy consumption, two-way picture orientation, looping video output, and HD-SDI in and out.

CCW 2015 and SATCON will take place Nov. 11-12 at the Javits Convention Center in New York. CueScript will be located at booth 993.