I have a .blend file with two scenes set up. When rendering, it seems it is still necessary to render each scene separately and then edit/composit them together. Is this the only way to go about itm or can blender be set up to move on to the second scene when the first is finished?
If each scene has to be rendered separately, then I can’t see much difference between setting up different scenes in one file or putting each scene in a separate file.
Of course, it is possible to render all the scenes at once…
In general, you have a main scene in which you composite all the others. When you press [F12], Blender will render all the other scenes because the Compositor needs everything that you tell it to use. BUT it doesn’t happen automatically if you render the secondary scenes because, by default, their Compositor node tree doesn’t contain references to the other scenes.
So… Add a Render Layers node in the Compositor node tree for each scene that you want to see rendered when you press [F12]. Blender doesn’t read minds (yet) so you must do it for all the scenes if you want to always render all the scenes, whichever one is active. The Render Layers nodes don’t need to be connected to anything, only present.
Just don’t forget to keep at least one Render Layers node connected to a Composite output node for each scene or else Blender wouldn’t have anything to render. 
Thank you - I’ll have to check out some compositing and render layers tuts, it seems…
I found a great discussion at http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/313/is-there-a-way-to-batch-render-multiple-scenes with useful tips on how to render multiple Scenes in a blender file, in a batch. Going from their tips, this command worked great for me, this weekend (15 March 2014), to render 2 scenes on a Mac OSX machine:
<b>./blender -b /Users/me/Documents/Projects/fishing\ video/3D/array-of-many-docs-in-space/render-scenes-1-and-2.blend -S 1 -a -S 2 -a</b>
This command opened my file, rendered the scene named 1, and then it rendered the scene named 2. Note that this path has a folder with a space in its name. I thought that might help some Mac users like me, to see a working example with a space in the folder name.
I get a lot of help from fellow Blender users, here and on other sites, so I’m posting this tip to give some help back, hoping it will help someone in the future who finds this thread.
Open a new blender file, select Video Editor and link the scenes you want
That does not render with the original output scene file names.