I tried deleting the 'sparks' sprite material and it didn't help. The emitter still shows up.
OK, I figured out how to make groups. I set the surface transparency of the group containing the 'fire' material to 100% and rendered, but the emitter still showed up.
Because I'm pulling the emitter model from the tutorial files, could that have something to do with why none of these property changes to the model are taking place? There's a little disk icon that looks like a floppy disk next to the 'smoke' emitter, does that mean anything?
Here's the last save: Fire_Original.prj
Yeah, I noticed the immediate differences between maya and AM. I'm using/learning AM to understand CGI compositing better for filmmaking. I was going through the training exercises but kept getting parameter errors when trying to load one of the models in the early lessons. I decided to go and learn what i need currently which is fire effects. I'll definitely watch those videos once I begin modelling.
As for the emitter problem, if anyone wants to suggest something else, I'm all ears. Thanks everyone for your help so far.