thanks for your help,

I just rendered the vharacters individually and composited it in after effects.
It might be asking a bit much, but I came across another problem. I created a nurbs image plane and used a quick time movie as a texture (.mov) The main part of the movie is transparent.
In the movie node I check, use image sequence and it plays.
But! whenever I render, the image plane is displayed as a black square. Even when I use a file that used to work fine, as soon as I use it as a movie texture the image plane will stay black when rendered.
Why does it render my movie black?

thanks again for any help