Impress 7.0 animation flickers and skips

during presentation the animation flicker and flashes across the screen. It is basically unreadable once in presentation mode. Using an entrance and an emphasis with the same trigger crashes all animation function. this si for new files as well as old files that used to work.

I also noticed this flickering that dominates the animation when I upgraded from 6.4.x to 7.0.x.

Strange, I was also running Avast Secure VPN at the time which provided a momentary workaround. It went into killswitch mode while trying to reconnect. During that time the animation worked nicely. I could recreate this. I tried doing it in other ways such as turning off wifi, or going into airplane mode, but those approaches didn’t work. I’m not yet sure if Avast Secure VPN is part of the problem, or just part of the discovery of a potential solution.

From the reference to Avast, I deduce that you are using Windows.
It might help to press Ctrl+Alt+Del, select Task Manager and see what is taking resources while you are trying to run a presentation. You might not need some of those programs to be open at the time, or possibly at all.

Thank you. I followed up on the Task Manager suggestion and stumbled on 2 (temporary) workarounds.

At it’s worst, the cpu was taking at 30% with libre office taking around 16% +/-

Discovery 1: When I temporarily changed the slideshow Settings to run in a window, the playback stopped flickering. The cpu usage was about the same full-screen or windowed. When I returned the Settings to full screen, the flicker resumed.

Discovery 2: Next in Task Manager, I went to the user’s tab, right-clicked on my user and then clicked Disconnect. On this instance I was logged out of my account and upon re-login I noticed that libreOffice had shut down abnormally. I recovered the work and the animation played back well in full screen even with cpu again at about 30%. On subsequent repeats of the experiment, LibreOffice Impress remained “up”.
This disconnect may have caused suspension of some other apps (in addition to LibreOffice Impress going down) which I’ll document here:
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.ZuneVideo…
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.YourPhone…
C:\Windows\SystemApps\ShellExperienceHost…
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.Windows.Photos…
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.549981C3F5F10_3.2106.14307.0_x64…(cortana)
C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.LockApp…
microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps

Maybe later on I’ll get finer detail on the correlation between this problem and whatever else is in play. I’ll restart my computer completely, but wanted to record some facts in case others with the problem see a commonality.

Your crashing out of windows which fixed the problem temporarily implies a restart might have been all that was required. Press Start menu > Power > Restart NOT Power off.
Due to lack of joined up thinking at Microsoft, the default for Power off is Fast Start which is in fact Hibernate, i.e. save everything as it is to disk so it will be slightly faster to load. This might have been a good idea with spinning disks but it increases the number of writes to SSD which is not normally a good idea and SSD are so fast there is very little difference in boot times between full boot and awaken from Hibernate. The other problem is if you rely on leaving things open, that your computer will reboot in the middle of the night following updates every month or two, losing any work in hibernation anyway.
You can turn off Fast Start by clicking Start menu > Settings > System > Power & Sleep > Additional Power Settings. In the dialogue that opens, click on Choose what the power buttons do (or Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options\System Settings). Click Change settings that are currently unavailable then untick Fast Start.
Check to see that your video card drivers are up-to-date also as that can affect video operation.

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Thank you, EarnestAl for that information. You’re probably right about the restart being all that was needed. I think I remember being tempted to take a peek at the installation before following through with the installations reboot. It’s possible that the restart then became forgotten. The animations in 7.0 look much better than in 6.4 which for me had some line-like residue around some of the animated objects.