Give the Project Media window a try. Select Video under the By Type folder which will show all video clips on the timeline in your project. Select single or multiple video clips using the usual selection process (i.e. L-click for a single selection, plus CTRL or SHIFT to add non-sequential or sequential selections), then R-click and select Select Timeline Events. The selected clip/s will then be highlighted on the timeline with yellow borders.

This video describes how to use Timeline Tools Display filtering feature

The following workflow works, although it does involve more than one step for each search.

1. Open Edit Details --> Events. You will see your Active Takes names

2. Click on the blank "button" at the intersection of the row and column headers (in the upper left corner of the Edit Details spreadsheet. This will select everything.

3. Press Ctrl-C to copy the spreadsheet.

4. Copy the result into Excel (or your spreadsheet of choice).

5. Sort the spreadsheet by Active Take name.

6. In the spreadsheet, search for the name you want, and then move the cursor over to the the Start column, press Ctrl-C to copy.

7. Switch back to Vegas, press Ctrl-G and then immediate Ctrl-V. Press Enter.

Your cursor should now be at the beginning of the take you want.

For each new search use Atl-Tab to switch back to Excel, perform the search, and then repeat steps 6 & 7. Once you have it set up, it is almost as fast as doing it all in Vegas, although you do have to switch to Excel to do the search, and then you have the Ctrl-C, Ctrl-G, Ctrl-V to actually do the search.

Finally, if you don't need the search capability, you can do everything in the Edit Details window. Just click on the "Active Take Name" header and it will sort the Edit Details spreadsheet by take name, and you can simply scroll to where you want to go, move the cursor over to the start time, press Ctrl-C to copy the time, click on the timeline. press Ctrl-G, Ctrl-V, and Enter.

Here's another approach that I've used on a few projects although it does require Vegasaur or Timeline Tools in addition to Excel.

1. Select events on a track. In Vegasaur, create a marker At Events using the Active Take Name as a label.
2. Open edit details window (Alt-6). Show Markers.
3. Left click top upper left box (everything turns blue). Then Copy—Ctrl-C.
4. Open blank worksheet in Excel. Then Paste- Ctrl-V. You will see 2 columns, Position and Name.
5. Apply Filter to Name Column. Select Active Take Names you want.
6. Then copy the remaining Rows making sure to NOT including the first Row. (Ctrl-C)
7. Back in Vegas in the edit details window, make sure everything is still selected (left-click on upper-left box). Then holding shift key down, right-click and select paste. Markers will appear only for events based on Active Take Names.

You could then export Markers based on the Active Take Name so they could easily be imported at a later time. How well this works largely depends on how you've defined your active take names.

wwaag

@wwaag: in Vegasaur you can:
1) create markers at events (with Active Take Name as a label)
2) use GOTO button to quickly filter by name and jump to the selected marker (event):

http://i.imgur.com/nYNCWRD.png

Thanks folks.

Project has over 3000 clips so the process:
Edit Details> Ctrl+C > Excel > Ctrl+V
wouldn't work. - too big for clipboard I guess.

BUT
by shift selecting first and last items in the columns I needed and pasting one at a time into Excel - I got what I needed.

Vegas devs should have a look at how to do this.
Not unreasonable to have huge projects that require:
1) Embedded in-clip markers that move with the clip.
2) Searchable clip names (take names- whatever but different to media name).

Thanks again

Did you click on that little "button" in the upper left corner of the Edit Details dialog, like I described in my last post? If you don't do that first, then Ctrl-C won't do anything.

I would be very surprised if you can't copy/paste from that dialog, if you do what I describe because, as big as your project is, I've actually worked on projects that are much larger, including one that had 14,000 events. That was a long time ago, and it actually did almost bring Vegas to its knees, and I eventually had to simplify the project to get my work done.

Dave, have you downloaded Timeline Tools and tried out the display filtering? This sounds like the perfect solution to your problem. No exporting to Excel or any other complex external solution. Simply perform the following steps:

1. Type in the Take name into the Media Name Filter box using optional wildcards or regular expressions.
2. Click the Match Filter or Reg-ex Filter radio button to filter the display grid to only show media name matches.
3. Select the Event in the grid that contains your media.
4. Press the Off button to restore the full display. Your selected media will be shown in the grid and centered in the Vegas timeline.