1. A method of operating a fragment shader that includes a plurality of shader pipelines and a fragment shader distributor for selectively receiving rasterized pixel data and video image data, for selectively processing said rasterized pixel data, and for distributing said processed rasterized pixel data and said video image data to said plurality of shader pipelines, wherein each of the shader pipelines processes selected pixels of a video image to be composited, the method comprising the steps of: receiving very long instruction words (VLIWs), each VLIW including a plurality of instructions for programming separate processing stations within a shader pipeline and a program flag bit, wherein different shader pipelines within the plurality of shader pipelines are programmed with different VLIWs; separately programming a first plurality of processing stations within a first of the plurality of shader pipelines based on the plurality of instructions in a first VLIW; receiving first video pixel data by recalling rasterized video image data from a frame buffer memory; processing said first video pixel data and said rasterized video image data to produce a first pixel data set that includes said rasterized video image data; storing the first pixel data set; programming a second plurality of processing stations within a second of the plurality of shader pipelines based on a second VLIW and the availability of the second shader pipeline; receiving second video image data; processing said second video image data to produce a second pixel data set; and merging the first and second pixel data sets to produce a composite video image data set, wherein corresponding pixels of the first and second pixel data sets are processed in a same shader pipeline within the plurality of shader pipelines.