Article
We have all had to learn many new skills over the past 12 months. Zoom is a regular facility we all use for meetings with both friends and colleagues, but also for giving seminars and indeed lectures on a larger scale. Last week, I was invited to give a lecture for the Pakistani Orthodontic Society by Anwar Shah, one of my old trainees, who is now Dean of a Dental School and Professor of Orthodontics in Islamabad. I suggested recording the lecture on Zoom and I would just then join the Zoom platform on the day, to only do the Q&A session in ‘real time’ … he would then be much less dependent upon a perfect internet connection, as he at least had the complete lecture ‘in the bag’. I duly recorded the 45-minute lecture, finished just 30 seconds short of my allotted timeslot. Perfect. Imagine my disappointment when I downloaded my recording from the Cloud to find that the audio was completely silent. I checked my Sennheiser Portable Wireless Lavalier Mic Set (which I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone doing serious presentations on Zoom) and saw the transmitter was set to MUTE!
Luckily, due to the OCD that is orthodontists, before giving the lecture, I had also clipped on my Zoom Field Recorder, which independently records a backup audio file of equally high quality. My problem was now how to stitch the audio file to the silent Zoom recording. I watched a couple of YouTube videos on ‘Beginners editing with iMovie’, a programme I had never previously opened on my Mac, and within 30 minutes, thanks largely to the hand clap I had done at the beginning of the video, perfect lip syncing of the audio and the video files was achieved. They say it is impossible to teach ‘old dogs, new tricks’, but I beg to differ!
Once again we include topical subjects in this quarter's issue, with an update on infection control from the Bristol team and an article comparing the modern electronic referral processes with more traditional paper referrals. Many clinical issues are discussed, including impacted second molars, condylar resorption and missing lateral incisors. A couple of ‘left field’ topics are covered in the composite sensitivity paper and non-conventional methods for accelerating tooth movement, but both have relevance to our daily work as orthodontists. Lower incisor extraction, in the last of the series on orthodontic conundrums, completes the plethora of fascinating subjects in this issue. Enjoy!