Apologies about the dubious quality of the QuickTime VR panorama - the entire format is completely bugged to death. Only Apple could create a proprietary format that cannot be read or created properly by their own custom code. The actual stitching was not particularly time-consuming (albeit very memory intensive) but, after a full day and night's futile haxoring, I've only just given up. No matter what compression settings or rendering method I employ, it seems that I'm completely unable to create a functional QuickTime VR file with a slightly less woeful resolution.
[cubic QuickTime VR panorama (84 KiB)]