Using a Nikon d5100 to film an interview? - 1

I'm a writer for a Toronto based music magazine (Raz Mataz Magazine), and I have an interview with a musician coming up tomorrow (Friday). I'd like to film the interview using my Nikon d5100 camera. Unfortunately it can only record about 20 minutes of video at a time. The interview itself is probably going to be at least an hour, and therein lies the rub. What can I do to film the whole thing, without having to stop the interview to restart the camera every 20 minutes?
Does anyone have any advice (and, no, "buy a better camera" isn't really an option for me)?

This is a job for a camcorder - particularly as you can't tell the difference between video (what you're actually shooting) and film (which has a specific meaning in photography).

Failing that, break your interview into segments of 15 minutes or so - you, your camera, and your subject will all appreciate it.

There's no way around the limitation on that camera apart from stopping and restarting the recording. You might be able to do that with a Nikon ML-L3 remote, which is quite cheap, but you probably don't have time to test that out.

I hope you are using an external microphone or the sound quality will be rubbish.

Asking this less than 24 hours before the recording is stupidly short notice.

Since you're a writer for a magazine, you could start by using the correct word for what you are attempting to do. Since the D5100 takes video, not film, you are going to shoot, record, or video the interview. You are not going to film it.

As far as the record time problem, this is an inherent issue in using a still camera to shoot video. Professional use of still cameras to shoot video is usually to do b-roll or video with no sound and only for short intervals because still cameras are better geared towards these types of shots where small camera size and short clips without audio are necessary. In your case, there's absolute no sense in using a compact camera with bad audio that can't record for long periods. What you need is a proper video camera with quality XLR audio. While you may think this is not an option, it's just a matter of fact that you are bringing a knife to a gun fight, the wrong tool for the job. There's no getting around it.

The best you can do is buy several very large memory cards and interupt your interview each time they run out while an assistant dumps each card to two hard drives (one for back-up in case of failure).

Still, you will have relatively poor audio quality, which is probably the most important part of an interview.

It's generally not a good decision, as you seem to be aware, to compromise the content and flow of an interview as a result of the interviewer's lack of preparedness with the necessary technology.

There seems to be a new sense among journalists that they ought to just take their own photos and videos instead of hiring photographers and videographers. Technology can't do everything for you, you either need to increase your education so you can do the jobs of two people, or you need to hire a second person who, like yourself, is a specialist in their field and give all videographers the respect that you would expect someone to give you as a journalist rather than trying to replace people with cheap gizmos.