Maya Mental Ray - the basics of linear workflow

Finally had a bit of time, between all of the stuff (work, teaching, life), to create a few videos tutorials!
I love it when people take the time to create detailed tutorials and I've watched more than my share, so I thought it would be fun to make a few myself. Since I'm teaching animation right now, I'm always talking about that and I'll eventually throw some stuff up about animation things related to my class, but for now, I'm mostly doing stuff that I think is more interesting to me lately and maybe a bit more esoteric. Definitely not super advanced stuff for the most part (unless you're a total beginner, which is cool too), but just sort of picking and choosing what I feel like exploring. Some of it is might be a bit complicated and specific, like some rigging stuff, but others are about stuff I'm just learning the finer details of myself, like the mental ray joint that follows.
BTW, I know that I can be a bit over-explainy and pedantic sometimes. So sue me. Too much classroom time (I was a HS teacher in NYC before I started digital stuff). But I hate it when people assume I always know what they're talking about when I don't. Just went to my finacial advisor and WHOOSH. Right over my head. Didn't understand a word. Sometimes the simple stuff is interesting to me too, dude. I went a bit crazy with the first one, so it's in four parts. I also get a bit fast and loose with the specific lingo sometimes (gamma correction, gamma encoding, float, HDR, etc). Feel free to correct anything that's wrong or bugging you in the vids, or let me know and I'll do it.

Anyways, I'll throw a bunch of posts up as I see fit with the rest of these mama-jammas . . .
part1=gamma, part2=basic workflow, part3=real workflow, part4=basic post stuff


Maya/Mental Ray: Linear Workflow Part 1

Maya/Mental Ray: Linear Workflow Part 2

Maya/Mental Ray: Linear Workflow Part 3

Maya/Mental Ray: Linear Workflow Part 4
Here are some of the links I mentioned in the video:
1. The man, the myth, the legend . . . Master Zap

2. djx talks about linear and gamma
3. Andrew at 3dLight talks about linear for Maya/MentalRay
4. floze does a tute about linear rendering in a series of interiors
5. A long CGTalk thread about the topic
6. A much more detailed Mental Images thread
7. A detailed article by Yves Poissant on Tone Correction
Good lord. Here's a couple more for post-production stuff:
1. A bit of AE stuff
2. S'more AE, a bit more complicated this time
3. A good generally useful pdf