Ok.... i'm going to dump my workflow here first.
 
1. shoot panos with canon 5d and canon 15mm full frame fisheye on a bogen pano head with a reasonably accurate nodal setting. I shoot 6 pics all the way around and a nadir and zenith. I also bracket the exposures in manual mode using 2 stops over and under as my setting (i'll be testing one over and under next).
 
2. with the images shot i take them back to the mac and dump them. I use photomatix to batch process the three exposures into one hdr then tonemap them in photoshop using the same settings for each. then resave them as full quality jpgs.
 
3. i then introduce the images to realviz by dragging and dropping onto the stitch window. works great to this point. i run an auto stitch and most of the time it's suprisingly accurate. then since i have to photoshop the nadir and zenith, i export the cubic images as tifs from realviz.  
 
4. i open the two images in photoshop and add a logo file and clean up the zenith then resave them for reintroduction to realviz via the load panorama function. they load up everything looks great. These images are full resolution, full size files so i know there is more than enough info for the render. I set my render up to use 70% jpg quality and the resulting output spherical panos look blurry.
 
I'm not sure what i'm doing wrong but it appears to be related to the hdr part of the workflow. If anyone has a better workflow for this I'm all ears. It seems that when i just do a render with no exporting or importing that the sharpness is fantastic. Is there a better file format to use for this so i don't lose the quality?
 
Carl
 
ps: resultant panos have a hazy/blurry feel to them. the hdr is excellent but the blurriness is completely screwed.

Hi Carl!
 
In your concluding paragraph you state that the HDR part of your workflow appears to be related to the blurriness, but also say that when you do just the render w/o the import/export the sharpness is fantastic.
 
And this is the puzzle for me: If the straight-to-render looks great (step #3 of your workflow), in which you've already done the HDR work, this HDR output should not negatively affect the succeeding steps.
 
The only thing I can think of is in the "Rendering Options" section of the "Render" dialog. Possibly when you are rendering direct to Spherical you are using "SmartBlend" or "enblend" as your "Blending Method"? These blending methods offer a powerful clean-up routine for fisheye images. However, you do not get to use these methods when rendering a Cubical projection - "Morph" or "Linear" are your only options.
 
But another puzzle - any blurriness would show up in the cubic faces themselves in Photoshop. But this seems not to be the case as you do not mention this situation - i.e. the lateral faces (front, right, back, left) of the cubic look sharp. But if there was a "smoking gun" for your blurry render problem it would seem to be in this Cubical projection phase of you workflow, not the HDR or Pano Conversion. The Panorama Conversion tool in Stitcher should not have any impact on the quality of existant cubic faces, it merely assembles them.
 
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Separately:
Why go to JPEG in Step #2? While this apparently does not impact things (you really like the directly stitched output), it seems to be an unnecessary step down from the RAW/TIFF flow of things you are otherwise using up until the final render.

Jim... i think i've narrowed it down to the rendering system used in RV. I'm not sure what settings to use but when i output cubic images and convert them with cubic converter into a qtvr they are so much sharper it is almost unbelievable.  
 
It seems to be related to my HDR process. I'm going to forgo that for a bit till i develop a better understanding of the software.
 

Carl
The problem may be the most over-exposured set of source photos. I've gotten the same blurry look or a haziness when I composite my source photos before stitching. Try leaving the set exposed 2-stops over out of the process.
 
I agree with Jim, save the composited source images as TIFFs, otherwise even 100% quality of JPEG compression will add Noise (fuzziness) to the final images.
 
Also, you might try adding a little Contrast either when you have the cubic faces or in the spherical image saved as a TIFF, before the final save.
 
I'm curious why you're compositing the souce photos in Photomatix (which version) then Tone Mapping them in Photoshop?
 
Good luck