This is probably such a simple question I almost feel embarrased for creating a thread. But let’s hope it might help other people in the future witht the same problem 
Okay, I have a scene in Cycles in which I have a static background on one layer and a character on another. The character is in such a position that you can get away with a static background (you don’t see any direct shadows or anything).
To save render time I would like to just render one frame of the background with my character removed. Then I would like to render my character with everything on the background activated except for camera visibility. I want the background to affect my character, but not to be rendered.
The problem is that the only way I have found to do this is to manually go into each and every object in the scene and set there ray visibility which gets very tiring when you are dealing with hundreds of objects.
I was hoping for a nice solution by using the layer settings under render settings but I just can’t seem to hide the background layer without also stopping it from affecting my character.
Any tips?