This has been a longstanding issue for me, and I just cannot figure it out. I am hoping that some of you can help me out here.

I've tried to look around many times here on the forums to try and 'self troubleshoot' -- but in hopes of making it very easy on you nice people for helping, here's a youtube link. It is just a default, quick Maya setup I did in order to show that I'm doing things right, but still having issues:
http://youtu.be/U_2a97P2IEg
Please let me know; it would be a HUGE help to me for this to work properly; cannot render an animation until this is resolved, obviously.
Thank you again,
John