Seeking advice on score "bug"/timer for a soccer game

Question

I just completed my first FCP project, my daughter's soccer game. I wanted to emulate a professional sports broadcast, that has the score "bug" & timer at the top of the screen and a graphic for each goal scored, naming the goal maker and primary/secondary assists.
I finally got it to work, but there was a lot of manual/tedious effort. I was curious if any FCP pros might want to suggest more efficient way or better tools which would tighten up this process.
To product the bug, I created a file in photoshop and then scaled and moved it with the motion tab. I left the score areas and time area blank, just filling in the team names. This was in it's own track above the video. Then I created 2 text generators, 1 for the home score and 1 for the away score and co-located w/ the photoshop graphic each again in their own video track. Each time the score changed I had to duplicate tracks and resize the duration and change the text to reflect the goal.
I used "Counter Display" (http://web.mac.com/piero.fiorani/PieroFFCE_Effect/CounterDisplay.html) to display the "game time" co-locating it above its slot in the bug, in it's own video track.
Producing the goal graphic was similar, and resulted in 3 more video layers. Wow, this was so easy in iMovie and took so much longer in FCP, admittedly with infinite precision.
Is this the best way to do this? Is 9 video layers common for the duration of you video typical?
Thanks

Answer 1

Id suggest using a number of panels and a layout manager to help sort out the HUD and the display. Consider havaing a specific JPanel for the HUD and another JPanel fot the display and use somethig like a BorderLayout to place them on the frame.
So in the JFrame
JPanel hud = new JPanel();
JPanel mainDisplay = new JPanel();
this.getContentPane().setLayout(new BorderLayout());
this.getContentPane().add(hud, BorderLayout.SOUTH);
this.getContentPane().add(mainDisplay, BorderLayout.NORTH);this will allow you to easily seperate the functionality of the two panels.
Id suggest to experiment with a few different layout managers till you can get the functionality you need. The best ones IMO are BoxLayout, FlowLayout, GridLayout and BorderLayout
Using JLabels will probable be the easiest way to go. To place Components anywhere onto a panel, i would suggest using the null layout and settong the bound pf the labes before adding them to the panel.
in the mainDisplay Panel
this.setLayout(null);
JLabel label = new JLabel();
label.setIcon(new ImageIcon("some image"));
label.setBounds(x,y,width,height);
this.add(label);There will be nothing stopping you from having the enemies as JLabels aswell as you can add any listeners onto JLabels. With buttons you might have an annoying border around them which you will not want.
Hope this helps