Does “Trigger other Cameras” trigger motion record or “actions?”

ChrisNicholson

I am troubleshooting a somewhat elaborate use case and things aren’t working as I expect. It seems as though when you set the “action” for one camera to “trigger” another camera, that other camera doesn’t just trigger motion record but also invokes its “actions.” Is this correct? Any chance this can be changed or made selectable. In other words an advanced toggle to trigger motion record only (my desire) verus also trigger the actions on the other camera.

I think the above describes it fully, and the below is not relevant, but I’ll still spell out my use case here since there might be a better way to do what I want:

I have a gate at the end of my driveway. Gate access box has a camera that goes through SecuritySpy (as well as my Control4 system). I also have two other cameras (three actually, but keeping it simple) that cover the driveway and the public road approaching my driveway. When one of those other cameras detect any kind of motion, they include in their actions settings to “Trigger” the camera in the access box. I do this so I have longer record of multiple angle on people/cars recorded in case they DO come on to my property. I’ve had that configuration for a long time, with no problems.

Then I decided to get fancy. I want an alert when a person or car is on the driveway in front of the access box (even if they don’t press any buttons). I don’t want an alert for animals or general motion. And I want to know if it is a person or a vehicle (unrelated aside, these are voice alerts from my Control4 system like “A person just entered the driveway” and then the relevant camera pops up to a live view on my C4 touchscreens). My approach is to have the access box camera set to execute actions ONLY IF a vehicle OR person is in view. But then, how do I know which it is? I use one of the other cameras to trigger only on humans and the other camera to trigger only on vehicles. With those three pieces of info, I can know if the thing is a person or a vehicle or both.

The problem is that the field of view for my “categorizer” cameras is MUCH wider than the access box camera. And since the other cameras seem to trigger “actions” on the access box camera, I am constantly getting alerts for cars and people passing by on the street but who are NOT actually on my driveway. I’d still like to record and archive these events, but I don’t need an alert (so masking isn’t an option). I note that I have masked the street on my access box camera so the false positive alerts are not coming from that camera.

There’s some other magic I use to get SecuritySpy to talk to Control4, but I am leaving that out.

A simpler way (for me) would be if SecuritySpy allowed separate “actions” settings for humans, vehicles, animals. But, AFAIK, it doesn’t.

Ben

Thanks for the detailed description, it's great to hear about your setup! You are correct that at the moment, the "trigger other camera" option does trigger both Motion Capture AND Actions for the destination camera. I think for your use case where you need finer control, an AppleScript solution option is the way to go. However in order to achieve what you want, we'll need to make some tweaks to the AppleScript dictionary in order to be able to trigger Motion Capture and Actions separately. We'll add this shortly and will get back to you here with the details.

ChrisNicholson

Thanks. I was thinking that I could clone the Access Box camera as two other cameras (will that consume licenses? I am full at 32) and have one clone just trigger action on vehicles only, the second on humans only and the third with no actions (with the third being the camera triggered for motion recording on motion detect from other cameras). I have plenty of CPU/GPU.

ChrisNicholson

Update: I tried my “cloned cameras” approach and it seems to work as expected and App is not complaining about exceeding my license limit.

Ben

Good to hear your method of duplicating cameras works well. We have now added a new AppleScript command that I believe will help you to streamline your solution - this is in the latest beta version of SecuritySpy (currently 6.3b2). Here's an example script to demonstrate:

on run args
	set reasons to item 3 of args
	
	if reasons contains "Human" then
		tell application "SecuritySpy" to trigger camera number 2 mode MotionCapture
	end if
	
	if reasons contains "Vehicle" then
		tell application "SecuritySpy" to trigger camera number 2 mode Actions
	end if
end run

Copy-paste this into Script Editor, and save it as a script file to the ~/SecuritySpy/Scripts folder (i.e. the Script folder within the SecuritySpy folder within your Home folder) - it them becomes available to select as an Action for any camera.

Say you set this script as an Action for camera number 1: when a human is detected in camera 1, this script will be invoked, and Motion Capture mode of camera 2 will be triggered. Likewise, when a vehicle is detected in camera 1, Actions mode of camera 2 will be triggered.

I hope this allows you to achieve what you want without duplicate cameras, by tweaking the parameters of the script for your particular use case.

ChrisNicholson

Awesome. I will play with that this weekend. Thanks!