Acadia:
Thanks for the detailed response, it sounds like exactly what I am looking to do. But I am a materials room idiot. Would it be possible to provide a screen capture showing your set up as described?
The background is Spooky Backgrounds 3. It has many excellent pics.

Baginsbill,
that sounds like a good answer but that image had no render dimensions specified. I loaded an empty screen, added V3 and then imported the background. Thats it. Never went to the render settings to set a dimension.