There are dozens of ways to try to enter automation in Logic (host automation/MIDI automation/MIDI Draw/with or without Smart Controls, with or without hardware controllers, using the pencil tool, using Track Automation, using Region automation and so on - in almost any combination). We're talking about dozens of ways to get this wrong. Counting hours, I have literally spent weeks trying to figure out how this is meant to be used, and haven't yet found a good solution.
The Logic/Kontakt combo out of the box somehow invites to using not host based, but MIDI based automation, because then you don't need to go in and manually assign eg Dynamics to CC1 etc - its' done for you already. But I wasted a lot of hours just on discovering that the solution that seems to work out of the box creates a lot of problems later. But as Jay suggests, the way to go may be to use the "host based" solution in Kontakt, meaning that you need to do manual assignments in one way or the other.
Next problem up: Kontakt and CC automation doesn't seem to be a real priority for Apple (and almost no orchestral libraries exist for Apple's own sampler) This results in a lot of surprises for the end users. In my attempts to make Region based automation work, I have come across several problems: 1) I get an error message saying that no events are selected. 2) A full region is pasted instead of just the automation (when I try to copy). 3) If I do the exact same things twice, I don't necessarily get the same results. This means that maybe someone tried to make it work succeeded, once, and didn't discover that if you try it twice something else will happen.
I've no spent another couple of hours trying to make this work, trying some of the most obvious ways to automate in Logic. There are many problems with track based automation as well, especially if you start to enter your automation in one way, and then continue another way - that whole process is everything but logical.
But in terms of copying automation, I have not managed one single time (in the current version) to copy region based automation from one region to another. I get only two possible results: either the whole region is pasted, or I get a message that no events are selected (even if I just selected them).
I don't see why a special way to select automation nodes should be needed (marquee tool, automation select tool..) - we should just need to rubberband some automation nodes with the regular pointer tool: then they'll change colour as a confirmation that they are now selected - and then use copy and paste.
In addition to the problems with copying automation, and problems with Logic saying that no events are selected just after I selected them, and problems with things working in different ways if you try several times, and the problems with starting automation eg with the pencil tool and then continuing with another method, one of the main problems have to do with the fact that sometimes, I can move a fader on a hardware controller and hear that it alters the dynamics - but still: I can't automate it.
Then there's the really long menu list for Kontakt parameters (more than 500 entries)... in order to select one of the parameters I actually have assigned to something, I need to manually scroll past 500+ which I haven't assigned.
Add the use of a hardware controller into this, and Smart Controls which defaults not to show whichever parameters that are assigned, but instead to show the first (eg 8) numerical values.... if you try to count all the possible ways to try work with CC automation in Logic (I'll exclude Articulation ID automation for now, for obvious reasons), you're almost guaranteed to waste a lot of time. The best solution for automating CCs seem to be to avoid the automation feature altogether, and use MIDIDraw instead, with all the limitations it implies.
And btw, I have sent Apple an embarrassingly high number of feedback posts about this, over several years.
