Understanding ZoneMinder's Zoning system for Dummies

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Background

ZoneMinder has a powerful zone detection system using which you can modify how sensitive, precise, accurate your motion alarms are. The official ZM documentation does a good job of describing all the concepts here. However, you will see gobs of posts in the forum about people complaining that ZM logs all sorts of events (ahem, as did I), ZM's detection is rubbish and in-camera is better (ahem, as did I) and what not. But once you get the concept, its incredibly powerful.

So instead of giving you a theoretical explanation, lets walk through a live use-case. (Credit: user kkroft helped a lot in me getting a hang of things here. You should also read his earlier explanation here)