The Eden Leisure Group has introduced a revolutionary means of advertising within the cinema industry – advertising in digital projection format.

Digital projection has been talked about in the cinema industry for a number of years. The present system, that uses 35mm film, is both expensive and bulky. The alternative vision belongs most famously to George Lucas, a champion of digital cinema, who helped to inspire Mr Spielberg’s film-making craft in the 1960s. His voice is powerful, too: when he urged cinemas to show Star Wars: Episode Two-Attack of the Clones on digital screens, the industry jumped. The big studios agreed to set up a consortium to look into digital quality-standards.

Eden Leisure Group operations director Edward Fenech said that using a digital projector capable of producing a quality picture has been made possible due to the great technical advance that has been experienced in this field. However, the breakthrough has been the software produced. This is able to command the time slots and, simultaneously, alternate between a digital projector and a traditional 35mm projector.

This state of the art system cuts both the cost and time of production. Contrary to the situation in the past, when cinema advertising involved the expensive procedure of production on a 35 mm reel, a digital projection advert is now recorded on DVD and may be used both for cinema and TV.

“While the cinema industry has a long way to go before digital cinema becomes an every day product, digital advertising is now moving faster and is gradually being introduced both in Europe and in the USA”, said Mr Fenech.

ELG has invested in digital projection in its top six cinemas, making available both slide and moving advertisements.

The latest survey indicates that over 60 per cent of cinema-goers choose Eden Century Cinemas.