Sony A7RII image pulsating in video footage - strange noise

[SkoNeedsHelp]

Hello,

After a recent interview shoot, I noticed a slight pulsating flicker on the interviewee's shirt and in other darker places of the video. I didn't think too much of it, thinking it was due to an LED light. But then I noticed it on other footage I had captured a bit earlier with all natural light. I checked more footage and noticed that the same pulsating flicker appeared in more and older footage also, often it was less noticeable but became more obvious when boosting the shadows.

I'm editing in Resolve and when checking the scopes, the pulsating was clearly visible across the entire image and looked very strange and concerning to me. I checked with older footage that I captured many years back and I was unable to find a similar pulsating pattern there, so I believe this is something that hasn't always been there.

So I did a harsh test - I put the lens cap on in a dark room with no lights and shot a few seconds of black video and then boosted it like crazy. The results can be downloaded below:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1d_CsE6FsXPg7U8bSBJT4hoPQ3TtdlhN5

Some technical info about the test:

• XAVC S 4K - 25p 100M
• ISO: 800 (the behavior is the same at other ISO settings, including ISO 100)
• Picture Effect Off
• Picture Profile Off
• In the files named "sony pulsing" and "sony pulsing-scopes" I shot in APS-C mode.
• In the "sony pulsing strong filters" file I shot in Super 35mm mode and boosted everything like crazy, revealing some really strange behavior
• The 2 PNGs are 2 frames that appeared back to back after one of the strong pulses to show the noise without video compression from the export
• I also included the original file directly from the camera (since this is complete darkness, you will have to boost this yourself to see the noise pattern, but as I said, this pulsating is noticeable in normally exposed footage as well - not totally extreme, but clearly noticeable when there isn't a lot of movement in the frame.)

 

My questions is - is this somehow normal, am I doing something wrong or expecting unreasonable things, or is something broken?

And if it's broken: can I do something about it, or should I send it in for repairs (or is this one on its way out 😢)?

 

I would greatly appreciate it if someone could take a look into this and provide any advice!

[SkoNeedsHelp]

Oh and just to clarify, I'm not concerned that there IS noise, but HOW the noise behaves