Hello
If you'd like some advice on the post-production end: Here's what I've found from grading Sony RAW .mxf. Although the same holds true for XAVC if you're using that.
I love the F55 and F65 (at least I love the files that I receive. I can understand why the F65 is not every cameraman's friend when it comes to handheld or Stereo3D rigs). I've graded (mostly RAW .mxf from the F55) on Resolve and Baselight for HD television, and on Mistika the same delivery and also for HDR (1/2/ and 4,000 nits). In all cases I got great results but, in the case of HDR deliverables, the Sony exterior images were much easier to grade for the brighter displays than the equivalent from Alexa and RED Epic. Arri and RED naturally try to fit everything nicely between 0 and 1 (in float. That would be 0 and 1024 in 10 bit). Sony records 'everything that it sees', which can cause 1st time colourists not used to working with Sony material to panic a bit as doing things like debayering a bright exterior directly to Rec709 will give them what will look like a very clipped image (all of the information is actually there. Sony just allow it to extend beyond 1/1024 where as RED and Arri round off the highlights to give a nice 'normalized' image). If you know what you're doing though then Sony material is great as it will give you 'everything' and let a colourist who knows what they're doing creatively roll the exposure to where every they want it to sit. Grading Sony files set either to Linear Light or SLog3 (underneath a final transform to PQ and then to the monitor) gives a result that barely needs any adjustment if you're simply looking for a 'natural look' for how the scene looked on the day. Adding a creative grade from there is relatively easy compared to most other camera formats as I'm not fighting an in-built transforms like soft-clips/toe-roll-off.
I would always recommend exposing 'correctly'. However, if you have a gun to your head and a maniac forcing you to choose between protecting your blacks and protecting your whites I would recommend protecting your blacks when it comes to Sony material (set to SLog3). All of the information will be captured (I can easily unpick the SLog3 curve/gamma and transform it to any other the other curve options. The Log curve is mainly useful for 'cheating' extra headroom when recorded to XAVC. If you shoot XAVC set to SLog3 I can usually extract just as much info from the file as I would be able to get out of the same image shot Sony RAW. The SLog3 is mostly acting like an 'Image Zip file'). The trick is to use a purely mathamatical transform, what they call a 'Shader' in compositing-land, and not a LUT which usually won't work with values above 1/1024. In Mistika the effect is called 'UniColour' and it contains all of the camera transforms, including SLog2, SLog3, as well as LogC, Cineon, etc. It makes matching different camera types much easier that grading them all in their native log flavours. It's the contrast/gamma that's hard to match, not the chroma.
Why save the blacks? Because in the end it's all down to light hitting the sensor. If no light hits the sensor then I have no image. I have to either leave those shadows clipped/solid or composite in some sort of replacement. If you have protected the blacks then (with the way that the camera captures everything linearly) I'll probably have most of the highlight information that I need as the dynamic range is very impressive. I can usually do something with the whites even with the brightest image. However - if the blacks are clipped then they're just gone. Nothing that I can do with that.
I've never really had much trouble with Sony noise levels, but I've most graded F55 material. If you want a cheap but brilliant denoise tool though then the NEAT VIDEO plugin is brilliant and gets consistently great results. I know for a fact that almost every frame of The Hobbit went through that Plugin in the end.
Hope that's helpful. I absolutely love it when I hear that I'll be grading SLog3 or RAW Sony material. There's usually more options and less limitations than I would usually expect.