How to Use a Teleprompter on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo

The 60-second setup

Five steps, in order:

1. Paste your script and pick Camera Mode. The text scrolls over the live camera preview, and the app does the recording. The overlay stays on your side — the exported video contains only the camera feed.
2. Set 4K at 30 fps. This is the default worth keeping for scripted delivery.
3. Mount at eye level. A tripod that reaches seated eye height, lens pointing straight at you rather than up at your chin.
4. Back up and zoom in. On iPhone 18 Pro, tap 4x and move further away until the framing looks right.
5. Size the text, then test. Font large enough to read from where you're sitting, scroll speed matched to your pace, then a 20-second test take.

If you haven't used the app before, the walkthrough of all three teleprompter modes covers when Camera Mode beats Prompter Mode and Voice Mode.

Why backing up fixes your eye contact

A teleprompter never puts the words exactly on the lens. There's always a gap — on a phone, the script sits somewhere in the middle of the screen while the lens sits at the top corner, maybe 5cm away. Your gaze lands on the text, slightly off-axis from the camera. That small offset is what makes prompter-read video look subtly wrong.

The size of that offset isn't fixed. It depends on how far you are from the phone, and it shrinks fast as you move back.

These are geometry, not test footage: the offset is the arctangent of the script-to-lens distance divided by your distance from the phone. Quadruple the distance and you quarter the angle. That's the whole argument for using the long lens.

The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max carry a 48MP Telephoto at 100mm with an ƒ/2.8 aperture, per Apple's iPhone 18 Pro tech specs. At roughly four times the focal length of the 24mm main camera, it frames the same chest-up shot from about four times the distance — which is what shrinks the gap between where you're reading and where the lens is.

Longer lenses flatter faces too. At 0.6m the main camera exaggerates whatever is closest to it, usually your nose and forehead. At 2.5m that distortion is gone.

The catch: you still have to read the thing

Backing up has an obvious limit. At 2.5m, text sized for arm's length is illegible. Every step away demands larger type, and larger type means fewer words on screen, which means the script scrolls more often and in bigger jumps. Past a certain point you're chasing the text instead of reading it.

That's the real constraint, and it's why screen size matters more for prompter work than for anything else you do with a phone. The bigger the display, the further back you can sit before legibility gives out.

In practice most people land between 1.2m and 1.8m — far enough that the gaze offset drops to roughly 2 degrees, close enough to read comfortably at a sane font size. Start at 1.5m and adjust.

iPhone Duo: unfold it and read from further back

This is where the folding screen earns its place. Opened flat, the iPhone Duo gives you a 7.6-inch display to put your script on — against 6.9 inches on the iPhone 18 Pro Max and 6.3 inches on the iPhone 18 Pro.

The iPhone Duo's inner display measures 7.6 inches diagonally, according to Apple's iPhone Duo tech specs — the largest screen in any current iPhone. For teleprompter work the practical effect is more visible script per scroll, so the text advances in smaller, slower increments and stays easier to track while speaking.

Set it up the way you'd set up any phone: unfolded, mounted at eye level, Camera Mode running on the inner display with the script over the live preview. The extra screen area buys you either a larger font at the same distance, or the same font from further back. Both work in your favour.

One trade to know about: the iPhone Duo has no dedicated telephoto, so the distance trick has less room to run — its 2x option is a sensor crop at 52mm rather than a separate lens. Our breakdown of what the iPhone Duo changes for talking-head video goes through the full camera system and where it lands against the Pro models.

Resolution, frame rate, and what to leave alone

Record at 4K 30 fps. Both phones reach 4K Dolby Vision at up to 120 fps, but high frame rates are built for movement — for someone seated and talking, 60 fps and above produce a hyper-real look that works against scripted delivery. Our comparison of 24 vs 30 vs 60 fps for YouTube covers why 30 remains the default for this format.

4K rather than HD because it leaves room to reframe afterwards. Shooting a slightly wider frame and cropping to a tighter one in the edit is much easier than getting the framing perfect in-camera, and at 4K that crop costs you nothing visible on a 1080p timeline.

Leave the aperture alone on iPhone 18 Pro. The variable aperture is a genuinely useful control for photography, but for a seated talking head the default handles it, and fiddling with depth of field mid-session is a good way to end up with two takes that don't cut together.

Font size and scroll speed

These are the two settings that decide whether a take feels natural, and they're linked: font size sets how much text fits on screen, and scroll speed has to match how fast you actually talk.

Set the font first, from your real shooting position rather than from your desk. If you're squinting, you're going to lean forward mid-take, and the framing will shift. Then set scroll speed by reading a paragraph aloud at your normal pace and adjusting until the line you're speaking sits in roughly the same place on screen each time.

Record 20 seconds and play it back before committing to a full take. Almost every prompter problem — text too fast, text too small, eyes visibly tracking left to right — shows up in the first 20 seconds. For more on delivery itself, our guide to filming a talking-head video on iPhone covers lighting and audio alongside the script.

Three mistakes worth avoiding

Filming at arm's length. It's the fastest setup and the worst result: maximum gaze offset, maximum lens distortion. If you do nothing else here, put the phone on a tripod and step back.

Writing for the page instead of the mouth. A script that reads well silently often speaks badly. Long subordinate clauses are where prompter delivery falls apart. Read every line aloud while writing, and cut anything you stumble on twice — our video script guide covers structuring a script for the mouth rather than the page.

Setting scroll speed from a desk. Speed set while sitting close and reading quietly never matches your on-camera pace, which is usually slower. Set it in position, out loud.

The short version

Camera Mode, 4K 30 fps, phone at eye level, and then the part most people skip — get further away than feels natural and zoom in to compensate. On iPhone 18 Pro that means the 4x telephoto; on iPhone Duo it means unfolding the 7.6-inch display so the script is still legible from back there. Everything else is font size and a 20-second test take.

The script matters more than any of it. A tight script read from 1.5m on a two-year-old phone beats a loose one read from arm's length on the newest hardware — reading it while looking at the lens is what viewers actually register.

Frequently Asked Questions