The point of a defect report is not the verdict; it is the routing. A frame that fails is information about which part of the process needs attention — the protocol, the scene discipline, or the finishing order — and each defect has a correct fix that is usually not “run it again and hope.” These are the five findings that appear on the bench’s reports most often, in the order they are usually diagnosed.
1. Character drift
Finding: the woman in frame nine is a cousin of the woman in frame one. Cause: almost always clerical — the character block was retyped and quietly edited between runs. Fix: restore the filed protocol verbatim and regenerate the drifted frames. No model setting repairs a paperwork problem.
2. Hand and prop glitches
Finding: fingers merge, jewellery dissolves, a cup grows a second handle. Cause: hands assigned to small, complex objects. Fix: at the brief stage — simplify the hand assignment or crop at the waist. At the correction stage, a targeted edit can rescue a single frame, but prevention is one line of protocol.
3. Light mismatch
Finding: the subject is lit from the left, the room from the right, and the frame reads as a collage. Cause: the scene line named two light sources, or a face swap was graded into a set lit differently from its source. Fix: declare one light source in the brief; for swaps, run the correction desk’s grade pass so the verified face sits in the target’s light.
4. Edge artefacts
Finding: warped objects and invented details crowd the frame borders. Cause: busy backgrounds pushed to the edges of a tall composition. Fix: give the subject margin and simplify the set dressing. Edge noise is a composition finding, not a model failure.
5. Stacked-edit wobble
Finding: after three corrections, the frame’s face and fabric have gone soft and strange. Cause: each edit re-renders the whole frame, and corrections compound. Fix: route back to the best earlier version and apply one combined correction, or regenerate. The report’s rule of thumb: a frame gets one correction pass; a second means the diagnosis was wrong.
The habit underneath
Creators who read reports this way stop experiencing generation as weather. Every failure names its fix, the fixes accumulate into a better protocol, and the pass rate climbs month over month — which is the entire reason the bench writes the report down.