Recording guide
A teleprompter for Reels and TikTok
Short-form is won in the first two seconds and lost the moment someone can tell you are reading. A prompter under the lens fixes the second problem, which frees you to spend your takes on the first.
Why eye contact decides the watch time
Reels and TikTok rank on completion — how far through people get. Nothing loses a viewer faster in a talking-head clip than the sense of being read at. It is not the words that give it away, it is the eyes: a slow left-to-right track, then a flick back. Viewers cannot always name what they saw, but they scroll.
Reading off a note taped beside the camera has the same problem in miniature — your eye-line sits off-axis for the whole take. Putting the words directly under the lens, over the picture, keeps your eyes where the viewer expects them and lets you watch your own framing while you record.
Recording a vertical piece
Shoot it the way it will be watched
Hold the phone upright and record vertical. Recito saves what you shot, the way you shot it, straight to Photos at 1080p — so what you upload is what you framed, with no crop surprise at the end.
Spend your takes on the hook
The first line is worth more than the rest combined. Record it several ways, keep them side by side, and pick — instead of re-shooting the whole piece each time to get one opening right.
One stumble is not a restart
Pause, delete just the part you fluffed, and the script rewinds with it. You carry on from that word and still end up with one video.
Set the pace to the piece
Short-form runs faster than you think. Scroll speed and text size adjust while you record, so you can push the tempo without the words running away from you.
Writing to length
Speaking to camera at a natural pace is roughly two and a half words a second, so a thirty-second Reel is about seventy-five words and a minute is about a hundred and fifty. Write to that before you record — trimming on the page is much cheaper than discovering in the eleventh take that the script is simply too long.
Worth knowing: Recito's free tier caps scripts at 750 characters, which is around forty-five seconds of speech. Most Reels fit inside that. The reason to unlock is not the length — it is that free saves carry a small watermark, and you do not want one on something you are posting.
What this page is not promising
Recito records; it does not edit, add captions, cut to broll, or publish. Short-form usually wants burned-in captions, and you will add those in whatever you already use. There is no auto-scroll that follows your voice — you set a pace and read to it. And a prompter cannot make a weak first line work; it only stops a good one from being undermined by your eyes.