RAISING the curtain on the country's first major film studio will make Scotland a truly international player for the first time and give the industry a slice of the UK's record £1.6bn movie-making pot, film industry experts said.

The plans for the 106-acre site on the outskirts of Edinburgh - chosen from 28 in Scotland - that have just received the go-ahead from the Scottish Government would be a "game-changer" and pave the way for a new role for Scotland on the global movie-making stage beyond location filming.

Experts said if blockbusters like Avengers: Infinity War, currently filming in Edinburgh, could be tempted to extend six-weeks' location filming to a studio run of up to 18 months it could be worth at least times more than the £10m the 400-crew entourage is already bringing to the Scottish capital's economy.

Rosie Ellison, manager of Film Edinburgh commission, said: "The value of the film industry to the whole of the UK is £1.6bn, just from feature films, in 2016, then there is another £500m from high impact TV dramas and all of these are using studios.

"£1.35bn of the £1.6bn is studio productions, and they all come to the UK so they can take advantage of tax breaks and talent.

"We haven’t been able to offer suitable infrastructure to the £1.6bn pounds worth of productions that need studio space, so what it means is we will be in with a chance of attracting some of that and getting more of it in Scotland.

"We’ve got Avengers with an estimated spend of £10m into the local economy and that is just location filming, which means that they are just filming here for a short while at a time and they’re go back to their studio.

"If they had a film studio it would have been a possibility for them to come and shoot the whole thing here which might means a year or 18 months worth of filming, with crew and jobs and training opportunities."

The Pentland studio would be much larger than the privately-owned film studio in North Lanarkshire used by the TV series Outlander, with up to eight studios, the largest being 30,000, sq ft and 70ft high, as well as a hotel, workshops and a 50-acre back lot, enabling the expansion of sets and facilities for large scale films.

Jeremy Pelzer, a former studio chief at London's Ealing Studios and a former head of London's Elstree Studios in England, was earlier named among the partners behind the £250m Pentland project that would bring up to 1,600 jobs.

One of the big productions south of the border to make up part of the record £1.6bn was Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which grossed £64.3 million and was filmed in Elstree.

Last year was Film Edinburgh's most successful year for film on record, with 2016 film productions injecting £7.7 million into the local economy, an 11.5 per cent rise on 2015 figures. There were 321 productions filmed in the region in 2016 including feature films T2 Trainspotting and Churchill, alongside popular dramas including Outlander and BBC Three hit Clique.

A Creative Scotland spokesman said: "Once realised, it will provide a welcome boost to Scotland’s screen infrastructure, generating increased opportunity to accommodate large scale national and international productions, provide significant opportunity for skills development and lead to increased growth for the screen sector as a whole.”

A spokesman for PSL Land Ltd, the company behind the scheme, said it will be "moving forward immediately with the application" with the first studio facilities planned to be operational by the end of next year.