Full-motion video displayed on a portable communications device such as a tablet personal computer, can be processed “on the fly” to provide a “zoom-in” and “zoom-out” functionality. Image elements are added to video image frames as they are read out from memory and prior to being display on the picture elements (pixels) of a display device in order to make objects depicted in an image file as being larger than how it appears in the original image file. Similarly, image elements are subtracted or deleted from video image frames as they are read from memory and prior to their being displayed in order to make objects depicted in the image frames as being smaller. Video from any source can be zoomed in and zoomed out.