Importing stills from iPhoto - terrible resolution?

Question

I'm a complete novice.  I have tried searching on this and have not found any suitable information for this problem.  I have become tired of the instability of iMovie, and just downloaded the trial version  of FCP X.  I've starting tinkering with it and have noticed that when I bring stills in from iPhoto to the FCP timeline, the resolution is drastically lower than what I see in iMovie.  Low enough that I really cannot use the pics because they look awful.
Here is what I am doing (and not doing, as the case may be):
Open FCP, click on the camera button in the center-right toolbar (similar toolbar in iMovie), find the still I want from an event in iPhoto, and drag it into the FCP timeline.  FCP opens a window stating it does not recognise the video format and gives me a choice of sizes to use.  It seems that no matter what I choose, the resolution is bad.  Now, when I do the same exact thing in iMovie, it does not give me a window about video format and the resolution is not bad (adequate, anyway, for what I am doing) - far better than what I see in FCP.
So, what am I doing wrong?  I know FCP is supposed to be the premier NLE software (certainly a cut above iMovie), and so I am convinced that the problem is simply that I don't know what I'm doing.
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

OK, so I must confess to being an idiot.  On second shot, it appears FCP not only imports the stills as well as iMovie, but the quality is significantly better, not worse.
Here's what happened - I imported an entire project into FCP from iMovie, which turned out somewhat disasterous.  The quality of the stills and vid is not good, and the Ken Burns and transitions did not import well.  Then I began piecing the project back together from scratch in FCP, and became confused which project was the import and which was from scratch, and I thought I was positive I had it right.  In any case, importing projects from iMovie does not seem to go well.  Is this typical or is it more likely that I messed that up to?
Just for completeness - the new project (from scratch) is set up as follows: 1080p, 1920x1080, 23.98p (this is the format of the video the timeline will see).  The stills are mostly 3089x2048 jpeg files (digitized film photos).
So, the question has become two fold in my learnings here:
1 - any tips or tricks on importing an iMovie project into FCP for the best results?
2 - any general rules of thumb to follow when bringing stills into the FCP timeline for best resolution?  This is working fine, as stated above, but the higher the quality the better my completed project will go over.
Thanks much!