How to Draw Counting Lines at Event Gates

The whole count lives or dies on one decision: where you draw your counting lines at event gates. Put it in the right place and every entry and exit is captured cleanly, your occupancy curve is real, and the number survives a sponsor's questions. Put it in the wrong place — across a loitering spot, at an angle, or on top of a staff lane — and you either inflate the total with people milling back and forth or miss the surge entirely. The good news: getting it right takes about two minutes in the setup screen. This guide walks through exactly how.

Key takeaways

• Place the line at the narrowest crossing point of the gate, perpendicular to the flow, away from where people loiter.
• Set an in/out direction on every line so the report gives you entries, exits, and live occupancy — not just one running total.
• Use up to three lines per view; one line per real gate. Never stack lines on the same flow or you double-count.
• Paint an exclude zone over staff lanes, queues, or reflections so only genuine crossings are counted.

Why counting lines at event gates decide the count

GateProof does not "look at the crowd and guess." It tracks each person as a moving box and records the moment their path crosses the virtual line you drew. That single event — a track crossing a line in a given direction — is one count. Everything in your Attendance Report is built from those crossings: totals, hourly peaks, and the occupancy curve. So the line is not decoration. It is the measurement instrument, and where you place it is the calibration.

Step 1 — Find the narrowest crossing point

Open the setup screen and you will see the first frame of your gate footage with a drawing canvas over it. Look for the point where the flow is tightest and people pass through one at a time: the gap in the barriers, the mouth of the entrance marquee, the lane between bollards. A line there gives the tracker clean, separated bodies to count. Avoid a line across an open plaza where people cluster and drift — the tracker can still work, but every step back and forth risks a spurious crossing.

Step 2 — Draw it perpendicular to the flow

Drag the two endpoints so the line sits across the direction people walk, not along it. A line at a shallow angle to the flow makes crossings ambiguous. Perpendicular is unambiguous: a body is either on one side or the other, and the moment it flips is a clean count. Keep the endpoints just past the physical edges of the gate so nobody sneaks around the tip of the line.

Step 3 — Set the in/out direction

Every line carries two directions, and here is where events differ from a shop doorway: you care about both. Label one direction as into the event and the other as out. Because the engine counts entries and exits separately, it can reconstruct live occupancy — how many people were inside at each moment — which is the number a safety officer and a sponsor both actually want. A running turnstile total cannot tell you that the site peaked at 6:40pm and half-emptied by 8; an in/out line can.

Set the direction to match your site plan before you start, and be consistent across gates: "in" should mean the same thing at every entrance.

Step 4 — One line per gate, up to three per view

You can draw a counting line at event gates up to three times per camera view, but resist the urge to stack several lines on the same flow "for redundancy." Two lines across the same stream of people count the same people twice. The rule is one line per real, physically distinct gate. A one-day Event Report covers up to three entrances; a Festival package covers up to six counting points over up to three days. Match lines to gates, and the totals across cameras roll up into one event figure.

Step 5 — Exclude what you do not want counted

Real gates are messy. A staff-and-vendor lane runs alongside the public entrance. A bar queue swings across the frame. A glass panel throws a reflection that looks like a second crowd. For each of these, paint an exclude zone — a polygon you drop over the area — and anything inside it is ignored. This is one of the most important honesty tools you have: it lets you count only genuine public entries and leave out the movement that would quietly inflate your number.

Step 6 — Set the recording start time

Last thing before you run it: set the recording's start time so the report's clock matches your programme. If your footage began at 14:00, tell it so — then "the peak was at 18:40" means something to everyone reading the report, and the hourly profile lines up with your line-up.

Then let it count

Once your lines, directions, and exclude zones are set, start the job and the engine does the rest — counting every crossing, building the occupancy curve, and rendering a 60-second annotated clip so you can watch the count happen and confirm the line sits where you meant it. If you are filming without CCTV, pair this with how to count event attendance with a phone; for the big picture of methods, see the pillar guide on how to count event attendance.

Ready to try a line on real footage? Count your gates with a $199 Event Report at your next event and see your first clean in/out count.