Abstract: A method and apparatus are provided for real time decompression and post-decompress manipulation of compressed full motion video. A decompressed play-back signal is supplied to a real-time video processing system by way of an adaptor for post-decompress manipulation. The post-decompress manipulations include real-time, interactive geometry transformations and color re-mappings. The adaptor includes a range expansion module for eliminating dead space such as found in CCIR-601 outputs. The adaptor further includes a resampling module for programmably converting the pixels-per-line format of the decompressed play-back signal. The adaptor additionally includes a clip-and-dither module for altering the bits-per-pixel format of the adaptor output signal and for applying a programmably-defined dither to the adaptor output signal.