Setting your Motion Sensors to provide meaningful alerts can be challenging with outdoor cameras. Below are issues faced from past tickets and my recommendations. Hopefully you get ideas on what to do with your cameras.
Tips and Tricks
Pro Tip 2: Camera time/date overlays can trigger the BI Motion sensors
Issue: Cameras keep retriggering resulting in long recordings with no events.
Fix: If you have time/date overlays coming from the cameras, the changing seconds can cause BI to continuously re-trigger depending on your motion settings, resulting in long recordings. The easy fix is to block out the section containing the overlay.
The simple check is to go to the playback window and see for yourself what is causing the camera to trigger.
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Pro Tip 1: How do I more accurately choose the location where the camera triggers?
User issue: I want to fine tune my motion settings such that I capture people walking up to house much earlier. I know I can increase the pre-trigger buffer, but that would result in ALL my motion triggers having this longer delay before a trigger which is not ideal.
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Couple of options.
- Having a pre-trigger buffer (5s is always good) is a good start just to get some recording samples which can be used to fine tune the motion sensors.
- The simple fix is to lower the minimum object size until the camera triggers further down the walkway.
Since it is an outdoor camera, by doing so, you may start getting many more motion triggers, i.e. false alerts, which would be a bad consequence. - A more robust solution would be introducing a Zone B. Zone A would be the entire area of interest for the camera. Setting a Zone A is a recommended best practice (see Triggers and Alerts webinar for details).
I would turn off Object travels because the A-B logic should provide needed alert accuracy.
- motion sensor object detection.png (28.17 KiB) Viewed 20836 times
- Then, you can tell BI to only send alerts when there is activity in Zone B.
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