You could, also, take some of the stars out of the original image and place them in a timeline on their own...crop it of course, and use some VV FX to make them twinkle apart from the other images.

Do you have a copy of the image so far...I would be intersted in seeing what it looks like.

If you got a lot of time to kill you could go the cookie cutter route. Duplicate the portion of your main track with the star field, drop on a track above, then (oh my God, will this take time)... use the circle mask and change its shape, color, which will give you the twinkle. You would need to add a lot of key frames, and use multiple filters, one for each star. If you're going to do all that, then I would first get a REAL star field instead of using a phony one. For example, many people know Orion or the big dipper and seeing the real thing in the background would be more real that the twinkle bit.

I have a copy of the image, but it is 206 MB. Need that kind of resolution for the stars. When I make it smaller it looses the reality of the stars. I appreciate the ideas. It looks like this will take some time. I especially like the thought of adding Orion's belt and Ursa Major. Very good idea.

Wayne

I tried a quick way to go about this, though on your application you make need to make add a mask in photoshop to work well with your project, is using fractals.

I used a Generated Media- Noise and Parented that to my star feild

Specs on the generated media:
Fractal smooth
No. of Layers 1
Freq X 30
Freq Y 30
Offset 0x0y
Progress 0
Noise Min 0
Max .370
Bias 0
Amp. .870
Grain .530
Color A Black
Color B White

Keyframe at frame 1

Keyframe at end of clip with progress set to (your prefference) to create the movement

Parenting options as defaut

A little bit of Glow and Light Ray effect on the Star track adds some possibilities to especialy on shooting stars.

Let your fractals work for you and save tons of keyframing.

If anyone wants the VEG let me know i can host it.

Thanks for the pointer to noise. I hadn't checked that out and didn't know there was a Fractal option.

I was also thinking of putting in a subtle shooting star at one point, but thought there would be a ton of work to get it to leave a diminishing debris trail. I wondering if blurred motion will help there or which of the filters might allow the image of the original meteor to persist for a while.

Thank for the pointer and any additional help.

Wayne

What if...

Thinking of those lamps with rotating cylinders, where cutouts are masked and unmasked... In P/shop creating a version of your graphic with whatever/whichever stars flaring/twinkling at their peak, creating a mask (maybe to cut appart) at the same time with feathered edges, moving &/or varying transparency of the masks or parts of it. If the mask layer/track sere set to revolve, or transpareny to revolve, and the stars that were to twinkle arranged to take advantage of that?...

FWIW, too real animations & CG can often be made more real appearing by dirtying them up to aproximate a camera view - it's what we're used to as viewers -> same reason for the lens flare etc. at times, used not because it adds to anything, but caters to what we're used to.

NASA used to have a pretty decent colection of royalty free photos available online that might help if one wanted to include some familiar references as was suggested.

I have a copy of the image, but it is 206 MB

Where the heck did you find an image that is over 200 mb??????

"Where the heck did you find an image that is over 200 mb??????"

I didn't find it, I made it :-) The stars were created with noise in Photoshop and then highly modified. I always make the master image very large and scale down when I pull it into Vegas, depending on the size needed. Since I wanted to be able to zoom in a lot in one area without loosing detail or getting pixelization I needed to start big.

Now that I have figured our the Pan and Crop animation I've scaled it back to a more reasonable size.