Blue Iris

Say you have a camera facing the driveway in the street. You want to record motion that happens both on the street and the driveway, but you only want alerts for motion in the driveway. Makes sense, right? A zone for each. Objects on, objects off, doesn't matter. But Blue Iris doesn't seem to support this.

If it detects motion on the street and is triggered, and the person/car/whatever later moves into your driveway zone during the same recording, that won't send you alerts for the driveway zone. The alerts list will update itself from "Motion A" to "Motion AB" (A = street, B = driveway), which I was actually amazed about, but the alerts for zone B won't actually send, only for zone A.

Given most cars enter your driveway from the street (I hope), it's a big deal. At first blush, you might say "Just use object crossing from Zone B to Zone A as a trigger", but I want to record motion everywhere and only get alerts when that motion ever goes into Zone B. Motion only in Zone B should be sufficient for recording, but not sufficient for every alert. Alerts let you set all sorts of zone conditions, so doesn't make a lot of sense for them to be so tied down to the initial trigger conditions. And BI already seems to have half-implemented this by updating the Alert memo when there is motion in other zones throughout the recording instead of just during the trigger. It's just alerts don't actually fire.

Have you guys noticed this? Is there a reason this obvious thing doesn't work? How do you get around it?

I do this exact situation for one of my cameras that face the street and driveway.

Define a Clone. Name it Driveway. You can also copy the settings from the original 'Master'.
This 'Driveway' Clone can be 'On Trigger'. Define the zone for the driveway only. Then alerts.

For zone crossing, zones must overlap, otherwise how can they cross zones.

A few different ways to accomplish this. These are the methods I use.

The preferred way...
Have the 2 zones (A & B) separated from each other. That is, they are not touching or overlapping and have a gap between them. The space between can be for travel time, or, to eliminate shadow movement by trees/bushes.
Then to 'connect' the two zones, have a third zone that overs either the entire view, or, the two zones A & B. I use zone G for the connect zone.
If the connect zone covers more than the 2 trigger zones, that zone will also be taken into account for the make & break times.

The Legacy way...
Have the two trigger zones overlap each other slightly.
I use this method to 'count vehicles'. Not all the time. I did this last year for a few days. Works great. I have two clones, one counts vehicles travelling North, and the other travelling south.


If anyone else can comment, that would be great. Is there a better way?

Thanks guys. A lot of the discussion was on simply triggers, but I was more interested in Alerts in my case. After talking to Ken, I was pointed towards the "Wait" action set which at first sight seems to take into consideration what I mentioned. It has an option to integrate newly detected zones into the alerts ("Adopt any new trigger sources or zones"). Each recording runs through the Alert Actions list just once, as soon as it's triggered, so you have to tell it to hold off on "shooting its shot" until something that interests you happens. In my case, I'm going to have a Wait when it detects motion in the Street zone to wait until "Camera is re-triggered or trigger ends" and "Adopt any new trigger sources or zones". After that, I'll put my Driveway zone alert for. Hopefully this should work, though I don't see how it'll deal with multiple repeated triggers in the Street zone before it finally moves into the Driveway zone (will the "Wait when Street" action just loop?).

I'm going to give the Wait action a whirl. If not, will go with the old fashioned cloning method suggested by @MikeBwca.

@IAmATeaf I only have the two zones, and they're bordering each other with no gap.

@MikeBwca Thanks for all the info, that's super helpful. I wonder if the Wait action ends up being everything I hope for it to be, it could simplify your setup as well so clones wouldn't be needed? Though your setup is mostly around recording and not necessarily alerts, right?