Making star fields: Transparent layers for stars made with noise?

Question

I'm trying to do what David Bogie described here:
David Bogie, "How can you create a flying through space effect?" #4, 16 Jul 2008 7:28 am. But I'm a real newbie in AE (I have 6.0 and have owned it for years but only used it about twice or so - I do everything else in PPro), so I'm getting stumped on basics. What kind of layer should I do this with? The choices in 6.0 are Text, Solid, Light, Camera, Null Object, and Adjustment Layer. I tried a solid black layer, but it is indeed very solid - when I make a second one, the first is never seen again. Null Object and Adjustment layers don't seem to respond when I put the noise and threshold effect pair on them, so they are apparently the wrong type for this. There seems to be no such thing as a Transparent layer type, or is there?
A secondary question (sorry to put two questions in one post, but it's probably simple) is about the threshold effect. It seems that the result is either pure white or pure black - I started with noise of varying lightnesses and even color, but when I use threshold to thin it out (to make it more like stars), the result is only bright white dots and nothing else, no matter what threshold level I choose. Am I missing something simple?

Answer 1

Sorry, Thomas, I thought you were the one who was frustrated - it sounded like you felt I needed to either upgrade or study the basics on my own before attempting something like this. And I wasn't belittling older versions; I thought you were. Don't ya just hate that lack of voice inflection and facial expressions that you get in online communication...! Okay, onward.
I read about the Pan Behind Tool before (if you start searching for "anchor point" and "position" it comes right up), but then, as now, I don't understand how it works with layers that have already been moved out of whack. And since my last post I have done way more to my comp: To try to reduce the afore-mentioned problem while still getting a variety of star patterns in my layers, I made all the positions 360x240 (which is the same as what I left the anchor points at) and introduced rotation instead - that didn't solve it, but it looked a little better. Then I decided that the time before the earth appeared was kinda boring, so I learned about parenting, made two of the star layers children of the third one, and bezier'ed some position and rotation action to the parent, so that it will look like the viewer's ship is changing direction as it's flying, and then when it steadies its heading, earth begins to appear. It's not bad - the flying motion takes your attention off the layer discrepancy. But when I showed it to my husband, who had conceived the original idea of this sort of video for the song intro, he instantly noticed the relative motion without me mentioning it - he didn't know what to call it, but commented that my stars seemed to be moving around. Yup! I am now convinced that it's not just anchor points, but the fact that the scale is different on the three layers. I even tried adjusting the rates of change of the scale to be the same on all layers (2X over the course of a period of time - one is 100->200, another is 60->120, and the third is 50->100), but they still move funny. Oh, well. So I finally just rid of the keyframes on the two child tracks altogether and let the parent do all the enlarging. I don't know how that differs from having each layer enlarge the same ratio over the same course of time, but somehow it is - the funny movement is gone. Unfortunately that eliminated the final thing that made the layers different - the current result could have been achieved simply with three layers in Photoshop. I would have liked to have "closer" layers enlarging faster than "farther" ones (that's the reason for multiple layers in the first place), but if they won't do so from the center point, it's just too weird. I have spent a whole day working on 18 seconds of video - I need to move on to the rest of my project.
Okay, now to address Andrew's post, which came in when this post was almost ready to send (I learned my lesson and checked before actually sending!). That's my kind of tutorial! In one sitting he teaches several techniques, effects, tools, unnumerable keyboard shortcuts, etc. Often when I watch a tutorial video, I learn just one thing in ten minutes, but this guy packs in the information. I will have to be careful to sort out what I can do and what I can't - I have 6.0 Standard, and he has Pro of some newer version (I don't know how new, but he was able to make great-looking stars in seconds using fractal noise, an effect I don't seem to have). As for using his idea directly, it had occurred to me that zooming in closer than I am would be cool, but I don't have any images for that. Do you know where one would get satellite images like that? Google Earth is copyrighted material, even though I assume the images it uses are not.
Wow, I learned a lot today - thanks to both of you for pointing me in good directions. AE is not as intimidating as it was yesterday! :-)