Vara Software Videocue is a desktop video teleprompter for Mac-based computers.

What a teleprompter does is to scroll in front of you ona dedicated display text that you have to say while looking in front of a TV or video camera.

Normally, to achieve this in traditional TV production studios, a special hardware device is mounted on a TV camera facing the person to be shot. The device contains a display that autoscrolls, sentence by sentence, like on a karaoke, all of what the presenter is supposed to say.

All news anchors and television announcers use a teleprompter to allow them to look naturally into the camera while hiding the fact that they are reading all of what they say off the teleprompter script.

Alternating the ability to reading from a piece of paper and then looking into a TV camera while finishing off a message is not an easy task at all. Try yourself.

But this new software solves just this very issue.

Vara Software’s Videocue not only provides you with a fully functional on-screen teleprompter, but it transforms your Mac in a little video production studio capable of giving a speaker face and audio to your PowerPoint presentations, or making it very easy to assemble news clips and your own video for a video blog or podcast.

Videocue lets you publish directly to multiple popular blogging systems # (LiveJournal, Movable Type, Blogger, Typepad) and it makes much easier for non-technical users to bring together professionally-looking audio/video presentations that can be easily posted to an existing blog/site.

On top of this, Videocue offers integrated video transitions, effects and over 20 built-in animated titles presets. Just enter your text and they are ready to be used. "Videocue takes advantage of the high-quality font rendering capabilities of Mac OS X, so you know it's going to look good."

Videocue costs $99.

Feature tour.

Demo clip. (As you can clearly notice, positioning the scrolling text of the Videocue as close as possible to the webcam, it is the only way to avoid the negative effect showing up in the demo: you can clearly see the presenter reading and pointing his eyes below the camera focus center. - Though I don't have Videocue, I have run into this problem before, and can assure you that with just a bit more careful planning and positioning of the webcam this can be quite easily avoided.)

Free try-out download (videos createed with it are limited to a maximum of 15").

N.B.: Vara Software is also the developer of Wirecast, a unique little DYI live video studio switchboard and mixer integrating the ability to mix multiple live web cams, chroma-key (blue screen effect) integration, high-quality video output to multiple formats, H.264 and streaming server support and more.