Clip automation and region effects are not working the way I expected.
 
With Melodyne Essential applied, edited, and dismissed as a region FX on a clip, I then added a clip gain envelope to the clip. It had no effect. I then deleted the Melodyne. The clip envelope then worked. Then I re-added Melodyne, reapplied the settings, and dismissed it again. The clip envelope then disappeared and could no longer be found in the clip automation filter. However, the gain was changed accordingly and the waveform shows the effect of the gain change.
 
So the ARA integration is pretty effective, but the workflow is constrained: do clip automation, then region FX. VVocal is more convenient in this regard because it has a gain edit page.
 
I wonder if all region effects will operate this way? Or is there a "pre- vs post-" setting on clip automation?
And can anyone tell me if the Melodyne upgrades can edit gain, and to what granularity? E.g. multiple nodes within a note?
 
  Bill B.

Before Melodyne can manipulate audio it needs to analyze it, basically taking a bounce. This is definitely expected behavior. Hmm, I think we may need to address the pre/post idea for Region FX with Clip Automation. I'll put in a feature request.

You can manipulate gain on individual audio blobs in the full Editor via the Amplitude tool. That's probably why I personally never noticed your use case before as I use Editor for any fine volume adjustment.

Pre- may not be as useful as post-, I'm thinking, given the non-editable result with pre-.
In the full editor, is there a way to apply an envelope to an individual audio blob?

After upgrading to "editor", I saw a description of the real-time controls: pitch, formant, and volume. The Melodyne manual says those controls should appear as automatable controls in the DAW. That would work for me, but those controls don't show in Sonar for a clip with Melodyne as an rfx. Did I read something wrong?  By the way, if the automated pitch control worked, that might be interesting for tape-stop people.

If you take a look at my blog on ARA there are some details about how the gainstaging works for ARA region FX. Essentially ARA is post clip gain so once a clip has been ARAfied, the gain is committed and SONAR cannot manipulate the clip level gain. So clip envelopes are not permitted on ARA clips.
It also wouldn't have much value inside the melodyne editor unless they had an automatable output gainstage.  However, today SONAR doesn't expose automatable parameters from Region FX. We may consider that for a future version.
 

Thanks for that info, Noel. Sounds like "region" is a completely new entity, or boundary for delimiting an audio segment, independent of underlying clip boundaries. Since I was always applying RFX to a clip, I was thinking of it as just another layer of a clip. It didn't occur to me how significant the difference is. Same goes for the composite clip/track, I imagine.
 
There may more to learn about the properties of a region. e.g. they can't be split, restrictions on copy/paste, etc (from the manual), and behavior when move/dragging.