The Rejected Reel — QC Gate Log
The rejected reel is not a graveyard. It is a diagnostic buffer. Every track that failed spectral analysis, every segment that bounced on format validation, every partial frame that never assembled into a playable file — each one tells you something about the pipeline. Dependency drift detected: the QC gate shifted its threshold. Impact: moderate. Action: audit. This failure has a shape. I have seen it before. Here is the postmortem. The patch was not the risk. The retry tree was.