The run opens inside the core's light: the strip's color stutters in and fills the frame (deterministic envelope — sparse hard flashes lengthening until the light holds), resolves into a column of light over the seam, and the camera pulls back along the game tilt until the server towers and normal framing takes over. Any key skips; MISALIGNED_SHOT=wake1|wake2|wake3 freeze the choreography for review. Root-cause fix uncovered during bring-up: Bloom requires an HDR view, and macOS EDR vanishes when the display idles, locks, or the window is unfocused — the HDR view then renders solid black, which was the earlier flaky capture and every black frame tonight. HDR/bloom are removed from both binaries (SDR + AcesFitted); glow is emissives plus the core's linear light fixture. Additive-transparency light shafts also broke the screenshot pipeline and are banned; the wake column is opaque emissive, dissolving by scale. Defense: opening.md beat 1 now specifies the wake shot (Cameron's direction, this session); the capture pipeline is the working method's definition of done and must never depend on display EDR state — the robustness constraint is recorded in computer-visual-language.md's calibration notes in this commit. Frontend-only: the sim is untouched; the wake is camera, light, and material choreography with a skip.