A cloud video system selectively uploads a high-resolution video and instructs one or more client devices to perform distributed processing on the high-resolution video. A client device registers high-resolution videos accessed by the client device from a camera communicatively coupled to the client device. A portion of interest within a low-resolution video transcoded from the high-resolution video is selected. A task list is generated specifying the selected portion of the high-resolution video and at least one task to perform on the portion of the high-resolution video. Commands are transmitted to prompt the client device to perform the at least one task on the specified portion of the high-resolution video according to the task list. The specified portion of the high-resolution video is modified according to the task list and uploaded to the cloud. Example tasks include transcoding, applying edits, extracting metadata, and generating highlight tags.