Paleo Retiree writes:

One of my favorite video forms of the YouTube era is the cutdown tennis match. Real-life tennis matches are just too damn long, you know? I played high school tennis; I’ve hung out with some excellent players; I’ve followed the sport on and off for decades … Don’t get me started or I’ll chew your ear off with my quirky tennis rants and quirky tennis passions … I think I qualify as a fan, maybe even a buff. Yet I can’t recall the last time I sat through an entire match start to finish.

So I’m hyper-grateful to the anonymous tennis fanatics who have edited a lot of matches down into ten or fifteen minute-long videos. They’re all over YouTube, dozens and dozens of great matches, distilled down to their essences. You may miss out on some of the grueling, marathon qualities of a full-length match, but it’s amazing how much of the character of a contest you can pick up in a relatively short time.

There’s lots of breathtaking tennis to enjoy in this 2009 battle between Federer and Djokovic, both of them at something close to their prime. Put it on full-screen (click on the little box-like shape in the lower-right of the frame) and enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw4X9Qz4PfM&feature=g-vrec

Who are the people who make these videos? How do they record and digitize the matches? And how many hours do they spend at their editing software?