Is Motion or After Effects best for animation of High res. photographs

Hi everyone. I’m a novice when it comes to Motion, having worked more with FCP, and I am encountering some confusing differences!
I’m making an animation from a high res. Scanned ‘photograph’ of a flower, and I hope to maintain the great image quality, plus working with a short sound file (breathing) as a guide for the movement. (The final output is going to be large scale projection using a HD projector, which I understand is 1920 x 1080, with smaller versions for pre-view purposes.)
The move to Motion from FCP has phased me (co-decs, pre-sets etc.. so many options) I could re-size it to suit, DV, HD or most of the ‘sizes’ supported by Motion but I’m lost as to which settings would be best for my purposes.
I have done various tests with different pre-sets and have found that the longer and more complex the animation gets, the more jittery the playback is. I am wondering if there is a way I can work with Motion that resolves the the perforamnce thing, or if what I am doing ( length and size of animation) would be more suited to After Effects.
I love Motion, esp. the language used in the manual and would prefer to stay with it.
Thanking you all. I really want to understand this whole ‘video’ to ‘still-image’ move I’m making.

First of all, you could do your video in either program and would likely get similar results (depending on your relative skill in each program). There's certainly no reason not to stay in Motion if you're happy with the interface. After Effects has just as many confusing settings as Motion when it comes to output so you're probably not going to feel any better there.
Considering your output, I would start your project with the Broadcast HD preset. That will give you the 1920x1080 frame size which should look great on your projected screen. I would tend always to work in an HD framework when working with stills since typically they'll be of high quality.
Make sure your stills are prepped properly for video (which is different from how they would be scanned for print work). Scan them in at a good size resolution 2500 px along the longest side at 72 dpi (high dpi is not necessary for video work). Also, use uncompressed pic formats like TGA, TIF, or PSD.
You didn't mention how long the sequence was, and length does make a difference at times because Motion is run primarily through the graphics card as opposed to the processor. This is a primary difference between Motion and AE.
When you are talking about jittery playback, keep in mind that it's the gfx card that is providing the "real-time" playback to begin with. So the larger the project, the less likely that the card is going to be able to play back in real-time. If timing is an issue you can change the view to draft (default is normal), or you can do a RAM preview (CMD+R). AE has NO real-time playback without a RAM preview, so keep that in mind.
One more thing. There are several ways to do the same thing in Motion. Some of them put more pressure on the card than others. Keep your project as simplified as you can while working, and turn off things like thumbnails and previews to speed up performance.
Good luck,
Andy

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