About RD Studios
Built by a Distributor
RD Studios is a film localization house in Chennai. Since 2021 it has delivered more than three hundred titles into Indian languages — dubbing, mixing, censor preparation and mastering. Picture and sound together, under one roof.
G M Ram
Founder & Managing director
THE FOUNDATIONAL YEARS
The company was founded by G M Ram in January 2021. It was not his first business in cinema, and the studio exists because of what came before it.
From 1998, Ram has spanned RD Films, acquiring, importing and distributing films across Indian and international markets. Over more than two decades the work spanned theatrical, satellite and digital rights, and took him to the acquisition markets where that business is done including the American Film Market, the Marché du Film at Cannes, FILMART in Hong Kong, and the International Film Festival of India in Goa. The relationships built across those years with studios, rights holders and independent producers are the foundation RD Studios was built on.
Distribution teaches a particular lesson, and it teaches it expensively: a film is not finished when it is finished.
Why the studio exists
A title acquired for India arrives complete in one language and unreleasable in four others. Everything standing between acquisition and release — the dub, the mix, the censor script, the title cards, the masters — has to be commissioned, chased and paid for, usually from several vendors across several cities, always against a release date that will not move.
For twenty-three years, Ram was on the receiving end of that process. He knew what a late delivery costs, because he had paid for it. He knew what a dub that does not sit against the picture does to a release, because he had watched one play.
RD Studios was built to be the vendor he had spent two decades looking for.
That intention explains the shape of the company. Most sound houses complete the audio and hand the picture back as someone else’s problem — title cards still in the original language, censor cuts unmade, masters unbuilt. RD Studios delivers the complete version. A film arrives in one language and leaves ready to release in another.
The network
Four rooms in Chennai carry the Tamil and Telugu work. Malayalam is handled through a partner facility in Thrissur, Kannada through Bengaluru, and Hindi through the studio’s Mumbai arm — ten recording theaters in all.
Where a title calls for Marathi, Bengali, Bhojpuri or another Indian language, it is placed through relationships built across the previous two decades of distribution. Roughly a hundred titles pass through in a year.
Our Motto
The budget sets the schedule, not the standard.
The studio does not operate a tiered service. Schedules are quoted against what a project can afford, but the room, the engineers and the quality-control pass are the same whether the title is a theatrical release or a satellite acquisition. It is the reason most of the work each year comes from producers and distributors who have used the studio before.
Roll sound.
Send us the master and the delivery date. We’ll come back with dates and a number.