Eight chapters. Open the one you need.
Every setting is a copy button. Everything else is one screen of reading. Start with 00 if you haven’t seen the video. Want it on paper? The one-page Build Sheet has every setting, ready to print or download.
00
Watch It First
One salesperson, one take, one customer. Everything in this guide is what made that video.
Nobody edited this. It was sent to one customer, by one person, in one take.
What you just watched was six live sources, cut together as it was recorded:
- The vehicle, pulled straight off the dealership’s own website.
- The salesperson on camera, talking to one customer by name.
- The dealership intro card.
- An animated map to the store.
- The name banner across the bottom.
- Website footage of the store itself.
There was no editor. Each change on screen is a button press in a free program called OBS Studio — the same broadcast tool Twitch streamers use. The rep presses, OBS cuts, and when they stop recording, the file is the finished video.
This guide gets you that at your desk. Most of it you can do this afternoon.
01
What You Actually Need
If your store already has computers, the price of entry is zero. Here's the other number too.
The six people who do this every day at Street VW have no lights and no green screen.
They shoot on the 1080 webcams the dealership already had. The busy showroom behind them isn’t a problem to hide — people walking past is proof they’re really at the store.
| What the BDC floor already had | |
|---|---|
| A computer on the desk | have it |
| An old 1080 webcam | have it |
| OBS Studio | free |
| Click the scenes with a mouse | free |
| What Flo bought because he's vain | |
|---|---|
| Shure MV7+ microphone | $299 |
| Logitech MX Brio 4K webcam | $200 |
| Light, from Best Buy | $100 |
| Elgato Stream Deck Mini, 6 keys | $60 |
| Green screen (a blanket) | $20 |
The one thing worth buying first
A second monitor. The CRM on one screen, OBS on the other, so you watch exactly what the customer will see while you’re talking to them. That beats a light and it beats a green screen. Most BDC desks already have two. If yours doesn’t, start there.
1080 is not a compromise
The customer watches this on a phone. The finished video is 1080 either way — a 4K camera just makes a bigger file of the same thing. Don’t apologize for the webcam you have.
02
OBS in Fifteen Minutes
Install it, set the canvas once, add your camera. That's the whole setup.
You set this up once. Nobody touches it again.
- Download OBS Studio from obsproject.com. It’s free and open source — no trial, no account.
- Open Settings → Video and set the canvas to match what your customer will see:
- Add your camera: Sources → + → Video Capture Device, pick your webcam, and drag it to fill the frame.
- Press Start Recording, say one sentence, press Stop Recording. Find the file. That’s a video.
Only if you work remote — the green screen
Skip this if you’re on the floor. If you’re not, a clipped-up green blanket and one filter put you back in the showroom.
03
Your Banner and Your Overlays
One form in, one link out. Paste it into OBS and your name is on every video you record.
Nothing downloads, so nothing breaks on a machine that didn’t create it.
Upload your logo, type a name, title and phone, pick a color. It hands you back a web address. That address is your banner.
Make your banner →Then put it into OBS as a Browser Source. These settings don’t change:
Drag it above your camera in the Sources list. The banner slides in every time you cut to that scene — that’s what the Refresh box does.
Hire somebody Tuesday
Go back to the builder, add their name to the same company, and hand them their own link. Everyone else’s link keeps working. Nobody opens OBS to change anybody else’s banner.
The other overlays
These are the rest of the pieces from the video in chapter 00, running live with Street VW’s details so you can see them. Paste any one into a Browser Source the same way.
04
The Four Buttons
A scene is a finished frame. Press it and OBS cuts. Four presses and talking is a whole video.
Four buttons and talking is the only thing most dealers will actually do. So start there.
A scene in OBS is a finished frame — your camera, your banner, a background, arranged once. You build a handful of them, and during the recording you just switch between them. The switch is the edit.
Zero editing, and it means zero
No post. No music track. No captions to write. You stop recording, and the file on your desktop is the video you send. That’s why this gets done on a Tuesday afternoon instead of never.
The scenes Street VW runs
Borrow the names. A scene list reads like a run sheet, so name them for what the customer sees.
The key map — Stream Deck Mini, six keys
In the Stream Deck app, drag the OBS Studio → Scene action onto a key and pick a scene. Use the Record action for start and stop.
No Stream Deck? You already have buttons.
The scene list in OBS is a row of buttons. Put the OBS window next to the camera and click them. Or set keyboard shortcuts in OBS → Settings → Hotkeys — every scene has a “Switch to scene” slot. A Stream Deck is worth sixty dollars. It is not a prerequisite.
05
Talk to the Customer, Not the Camera
Eight things. None of them are acting. All of them are how you already talk to someone at your desk.
Body and face
- Hands in frame inside the first ten seconds. People are wired to want a stranger’s hands visible, and you’re asking this one to spend forty thousand dollars.
- Loose shoulders. A tense body reads as someone with something to hide — which is already what they suspect about a car dealership.
- Rest your eyes on the lens. Don’t stare at it, and don’t look past it.
- Drop your eyebrows. Raised brows and wide eyes is the face of someone who isn’t sure, and it transfers.
How you sound
- Pause instead of “um.” Half a second of silence sounds like a person who knows the car.
- End your sentences going down. Going up sounds like you’re asking permission.
- Use their name once at the top and once at the close.
- Say what the car is before you say who you are.
None of this is performance. It’s how you already talk to somebody standing at your desk. The camera is the only thing that made it weird.
06
Beyond the Showroom
The same rig, aimed at your service drive. The customer in the lane is your cheapest used car.
You already have their car in your building. You just haven’t asked for it.
Service-drive acquisition is the easiest video in the whole system, because there’s no inventory in it. You aren’t selling a car. You’re telling somebody you’d like to buy theirs. That’s why the “We want your car” overlay in chapter 03 is the starter template, not the advanced one.
What it did at Street VW
The Service Acquisitions lead source, before and after the video program — two 90-day windows, from DriveCentric:
07
Send It
The video is a file and a link. It goes out through the CRM you already use.
Recording is the hard part. Sending is the part you already know how to do.
When you stop recording, OBS saves a video file. Attach it or upload it in your CRM the way you’d send any video, from the same customer record. Nothing about the send is special to the mini studio.
Captions
Most people watch these on a phone, often with the sound off, so captions matter. At Street VW the CRM is DriveCentric, and DriveCentric generates captions for video — right now in its mobile app, with more on the way.
This chapter tracks that. When captions reach the desktop workflow, the steps go here.