Rendering procedure and questions

[wt200999]

This will be my first year doing this so its a little new to me as far as rendering procedure. I have a series of questions and I could use some pointers too (as well as some other people I hope )

-Can I set up and render into one file, several different scenes. They all have different lighting in them, one even uses video post.
-Should I be using skylight (makes everything look better) and if so, how long for an animation usually would you guess it would take with a network render on ~18 computers? All with about 1 gig of ram (I dont know much about network rendering though)
-I have no clue what I am doing with network rendering, but I have found a tutorial on it, but if you have any pointers it would be very helpful (I saw someone here doing it well)
-The thing about the blank borders, is there an easy way to do this without having to edit all of my cameras?
-Is another program allowed to be used to join clips together, or make the border?

Thank you.