Using still images with Final Cut (and the apple suite in general)

Question

I have had a re-occuring and long term problem that has caused me many lost hours of head scratching and work arounds, and as of yet I have not been able to come up with a good solution.
Its to do with integrating still images with the Final Cut suite.
If I receive a high quality image from a client to use in their video and I then try importing it into Final Cut and animating it, it always ends up looking like a pile of ahem. Often I will get "swimming" lines appear across fine detail on the image, and parts of it will flicker as it moves across the screen. For instance, if I have a picture of some blinds or other fine detail (especially horizontal and vertical lines), when I add a grow and throw movement to it the detail will become very noisy - buzzing and flickering like mad.
I have found I can counter this by resizing the image in photoshop to a resolution closer to SD video (700w or 500h) - but I always end up losing detail, and the flickering and noise is only reduced, not eliminated. Other things that have helped are blur effects applied at a very low level, like 0.5 blur, so its not noticeable visually, but Final Cut seems to treat it differently and quieten the noise and flicker down.
However, all of these workarounds are ultimately still giving a reduced quality product.
Also, this problem is not necessarily constrained to Final Cut, I am currently fighting DVD Studio Pro because it is murdering the text quality in a stills slideshow I am creating - and in this situation there is no animation being applied. No matter what file type (psd, jpeg, tiff, png...) or size I output the text and images from Photoshop in, the moment DVD studio pro gets hold of it, it turns to cripe.
For a while I was putting it down to the fact that I usually edit in SD (PAL) formats, and there just wasn't the resolution available to reproduce fine detail. However, I do often see other people achieving pin-sharp fine detail on still images and text in SD formats (the Apple templates are a good example)
So, my question to you, oh great and high boffins, if you are dealing with still images and text, how do you do it? How do you work around any noise problems you have, and how do you produce those pin-sharp images (both moving and still) I see in other professional productions?
Quad G5   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

still images with too high a resolution will always cause problems. this is due to the detail of the image being finer than the scanline of the tv can display ... obviously this will caise the image to flicker as these details alternately appear and disappear as and when the scanline can display them. as you have discovered, the answer is to apply a very small blur, the effect being that the detail is spread by the blur such that the scanline can dislay it correctly.
text issues are often rooted in the same problem ... unless the text is placed very carefully (whole even number on the y axis) then the quality may be impaired due to the resulting interlacing/scanline issues