When I was just doing slide shows in digital, I used to shoot stills at the highest resolution my camera would allow as I would often zoom into the photo during its display, and the extra resolution kept it sharp even if I was displaying only a portion.

Fast forward to now....If I want to have some stills in a HD video production, and plan just to display them - nothing fancy... is there ANY reason to shoot them at a resolution higher than the finished product (e.g. x1080) ? What do I gain by shooting at a higher resolution? Or am I missing something. From my other experience higher resolution vastly increases render time, and in this instance for what?

Can someone confirm my reasoning on this and offer reasons why I might want to use a higher res? Thanks.

If you don't want to zoom in, then shoot them at your output resolution.

But I would take the photos at a little higher resolution because most cameras use a 8 x 12 frame which does not match the 16 x 9 frame of HD.

So some more resolution might give you some wiggle room in terms of cropping and posotioning to fill the frame with the best content.

Plus, HD is going to show much more detail than SD for photographs.

Personally I shoot at high resolution, then later batch resize the images down to a smaller size before importing them into video projects.

Having the high-rez original keeps options open for other projects; batch resizing (in Photoshop, Irfanview, whetever...) takes only moments and fixes the render time issue.