unsteady still images

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You should not attempt a serious edit by only looking at the computer monitor for judging quality.

FCP is designed to be operated with an external video monitor connected
(through a camcorder is just fine) DURING the edit process.
The external video monitor should have shown you any flickers or “image buzzing” before output.

Try this:
Apply the Video Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

Adjust the setting to 0.25 and keep adding “more” (up to 0.75 or even 2.0) as you observe the results.

As images (moving or stills) are more “complex” they can “buzz”on the video screen.
Adding the Gaussian Blur Filter can create an image that looks smoother.

You need to RENDER the effect to view full quality on the external monitor.

In FCP 5 set your video processing to “Best Quality” (It defaults to “Normal”).

[Johnw3d]

If you are importing high-res images with lots of high-frequency content, often the deflicker filters in FCP don’t help as much as you’d like. You should certainly try the small-radius gaussian blur that MAtte recommends. You could also try downsampling to exact frame sizes in Photoshop before importing or applying a pixel or two vertical directional blur in Photoshop.

If you are panning or zooming the illustrations, you can’t really downsample beforehand, as you need enough resolution to avoid zooming past 100% crop. The Pan Zoom Pro plugin I developed might help in this case, as it has an adaptive deflicker filter that often does a better job than the built-in one without over-blurring the image. If you want to try it, you can get a demo copy here: https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/index.htm#pzp. It might also work for you on static images, providing you use fairly hi-res imports (say 2 or 3 x the sequence frame size).

Cheers,
John
Lyric Media