How do I texture an ocean scene without using a background world image?

Question

I am creating an animation for a black and white ocean scene for a cinemagraph to be assembled in After Affects. I've set up my ocean and a couple of light sources to get the look I want as shown below:

This is a rendered view of the scene:

I am unable to export this b/w ocean with a transparent background (either as a png or an AVI file) because every time try to remove the world background image (b/w sunset), the ocean becomes devoid of any color too. I just need the ocean to be b/w and the background to be empty. Tried messing around with nodes and background colors without any luck. 2nd day of trying out the software, so any help with this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I guess what you need to do is deactivate the Camera option in the Ray Visibility of the World to make the world invisible to the camera but keep the reflections, and enable the Transparent option of the Render to make the background tranparent: