I am experiencing a suite of bugs making first person animations and I cannot tell if it's user error.

I am very new to Unreal Engine, so I don’t know what I don’t know.

I am attempting to animate a simple hand wave from the first person POV.

To do so, I am placing a Control Rigged mannequin in my scene, attaching a camera to the head, and posing the skeleton at my key frames. I am then baking the sequences.

I am experiencing 3 major issues that are driving me insane

1: There are no in-between frames between my first and second Key Frames

Each time I bake the animation, the first key frame jumps to the second without any inbetweens. From there, the rest of the key frames have inbetweens, but not the first two.

2: I cannot preview the animation in sequence editor timeline

While I am posing my character, I am unable to play back the animation w/ the “play” button. I cannot see how I did until I bake the sequence and review it after-the-fact

3: I often cannot see the mesh

Sometimes, I can see the rig, but the mesh itself is not moving.

What am I doing wrong? Are these known bugs or simple user error?